Mixing felt pianos

Why a felt piano fights the mix

Sounds cut because they're loud, transient-heavy or bright. The moment the felt goes in, the instrument gets quieter, soft and hard playing land closer together, and the top end goes muffled. All three, out the window.

There's a second cost. A quieter instrument means cranking the preamps, which lifts the noise floor. With samples it's worse: play a chord and you get that noise floor multiplied by the number of notes you hit.

Below are five techniques I keep coming back to when I need an intimate piano to fit. Four of them happen before you open a single plugin.

1. Arranging is mixing

Tracks built around a felt piano turn muddy for one reason: almost everything else is sitting in the same part of the spectrum. A felt piano will never win that fight, so don't stage it. Decide where the piano lives first, then write everything else around it.

Here's an example, a track by one of my favourite artists, Nils Frahm.

What I love about it, mix-wise, is that nothing clutters anything. The viola flageolets take the high end. The sub-bass takes care of the - well - low end. The piano gets the midrange to itself.

Then a mournful cello line enters around 2:47. It sits in the same range as the piano and still keeps its own space, because it's louder and holds longer notes, while the piano is all transient.

That's arrangement doing the mixing. Everything else is written around what we love about a felt piano, so the piano never has to compete.

Why fight the natural qualities of a felt piano? They're the reason you love the sound.

2. Make everything else cut

But what if you want the piano right in the middle of everything? Low, moody chords, and also the sound of a 909-style drum machine and a rack of vintage synths.

This track by Kiasmos, the duo of Janus Rasmussen and Ólafur Arnalds, is a good example.

Big monitors or laptop speakers, it makes no difference: the piano is sharing space with the drums and everything else.

Here the move is to give everything else the three qualities from the top of this piece. Transients, top end, loudness. If the piano won't cut through the track, let the track cut through the piano.

Listen to how bright those drums are. Even the kick has an extended top end. The bottom gets the same treatment: heavy, thumping, and just plain big. None of that is true of the piano chords underneath.

And that's the point. If everything were as exposed as those drums, there'd be nothing left to listen to.

So compress, lift the top end and sharpen the transients on everything except the piano. You get the clarity without fighting the instrument or dragging its noise floor up.

Here's Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen taking the track apart, if you're curious.

3. Ease off the reverb (and the other one)

Don't get me wrong, I love reverb. But your felt piano is all midrange, and so is most of what surrounds it. Including the reverb tails.

Backing off the decay or the dry/wet is the easy part. The other reverb is in the piano.

Lift the dampers and every string in the instrument rings in sympathy with the note you played, with the soundboard behind them. Press the sustain pedal and you've routed your playing straight into it. Don't take my word for it: play something, sampled or real, and slowly engage the pedal halfway through. Reverb, on.

So the easiest way to declutter a busy passage? Release the pedal.

If your sampled piano has a release control, automate it. Lengthen or shorten the tails there instead of reaching for the pedal every time. Your mix will thank you.

4. Make room for it

Sometimes it can't be fixed in the writing, and you have to clear the space with mix tools. A nice approach that helps pianos cut just a touch more is to lift the top end with a smooth shelving EQ (if you don't mind the hiss!). Kolor is great for that - you can crank up the highs a lot, without making them brittle, which will push the felted transients to the front.

When it comes to the opposite - carving - there are two plugins I reach for besides the omnipresent FabFilter Pro-Q (which is great). Neither is magic, and both work better on a problem you've already tried to solve properly.

Trackspacer, by Wavesfactory. If you've used sidechain compression, you have the idea. The difference is that Trackspacer only ducks the frequencies where the two tracks collide: it analyses your piano in real time and takes those frequencies out of whatever you put the plugin on.

Use it gently. Too much and the holes get too big, and some of the magic goes with them.

The second is SplitEQ, by Eventide. It EQs a sound's transients and its sustain separately, so you can lift the top end of the piano's attack and pull it back down as the note rings on.

It sharpens the exact quality the felt took away, without lifting the noise floor.

5. A moment of truth

At some point it's worth asking the bigger question. Is a felt piano what this track needs?

Maybe what you love is the fragility, or that soft tsss sound when a hammer meets the felt, and another piano will give you that without the drawbacks.

If you're taking the felt route, I hope the five above make your mixes clearer and more fun. Lekko is the softest one I could find, and you can play it for free.

If you'd rather look elsewhere, have a listen to Bardzo: a 1970s touring grand with two strings per key and no soundboard, so you get much of the mechanical character of a felt piano and a tone that holds its own in an arrangement. The Una Corda by Native Instruments works on a related idea, one string per note rather than two.

A felt piano is a sound you commit to early. It comes with limits, and limits can be every bit as inspiring as possibilities. You made a musical decision. Now you make it work.