Recording Lekko: the softest piano I could find

A very serious piano? No, thank you.

I wanted to avoid the popular brands. The Yamahas, Petrofs and Schimmels have been sampled so many times the sound has worn smooth. Record one more and you're adding to the pile.

So I looked off the beaten path. I'm based in Poland, where the easy finds are Polish, Russian and Belarusian. The Russian and Belarusian ones I ruled out fast. The Polish post-war ones pull in opposite directions: a Legnica bright and mid-forward, a Calisia dark and muddy. Neither was the sound in my head.

I don't drive, so the search happened by train. Find an upright listed online, cross the country, turn up at a stranger's door to play their piano. They'd ask the usual things. How long have you played? Did you study? I'd give some honest, underwhelming answer, open the lid, put my ear almost on the strings, and play as softly as possible. It raised a few eyebrows.

I only cared about the quietest end of the instrument, ppp to p, where a piano stops projecting and starts to whisper. Most didn't survive that test. And almost none of these lesser-known uprights had the felt bar or soft pedal some pianos use, so whichever I chose, I'd be modifying it myself.

That took some imagination. I wasn't listening to how the piano sounded. I was listening to what it would become. Lay felt between the hammers and the strings and you lose some top end, the transients soften, the dynamics round off. A piano that was already dark would only get more so.

Then I found a Swedish upright. Small, built for a living room rather than a stage. Undampened it was a touch forward, but I could hear how easily that would settle. It had spent part of its life in a library and still wears the green inventory tag. The tuner selling it tried to talk me out of it. He had better-playing pianos around, had most likely picked this one up cheaply, and saw no serious musical value in it. Serious pianos are apparently a thing. When you play a serious piano, you can wear a suit. None of that mattered to a self-taught guy in his twenties with an ear stuck to the strings, pretending to be Nils Frahm (without the finger skills).

That little piano was the one. After three months by train, something finally moved me. I took it home, and the real work started.

Getting to know it, one note at a time

This was the first piano I ever tuned myself.

When the tuner gave it its first tuning, I spent two days beside him, watching and asking questions. It took a good while longer to get relatively not terrible at it, but I still tune my studio piano myself.

Then, what to lay between the hammers and the strings. The name says felt, so I started with felt. It muted the piano too much: the notes stopped ringing, and it sounded like knocking on wood. So I worked through a pile of other materials, listening for one that softened the tone without smothering it. The winner was an old cotton t-shirt, cut into pieces. It's called a felt piano. What's doing the work is a cut-up shirt. Sweet.

Sampling an instrument is quite possibly the closest you ever get to it. You play every note alone, and the piano stops being a piano and turns into a list of small truths. This key sticks. That one crackles. You develop a soft spot for C3. That D#4 starts to piss you off. Some notes sound brighter than their neighbours for no apparent reason. None of it shows up when you sit and play, where your hands and the music carry you. Record it note by note and there's nowhere to hide.

I came out of it knowing the instrument inside out. The problem was the room. I was still working in a bedroom studio, and when you record a sound this quiet, the microphones hear everything.

A 32 sqm flat, between 1 and 4 AM

The entire flat was 32 square metres. The piano sat in one corner of the room I called a studio, a kitchen along one wall, a bed against another.

At the volume I was after, the microphones picked up everything the building did. Traffic. Footsteps upstairs. The fridge. So I recorded between 1 and 4 AM, when the city went quiet. Sampling every key with several round robins takes hours, so the work spread across a few nights. I hope my neighbours didn't mind. I didn't ask, just in case.

The microphones were Beesneez, a small Australian maker that started out repairing vintage Neumanns before building its own. The main pair were their Lulu Tube, a valve copy of the Neumann KM-54, set close and angled towards the keys. A spaced pair leaves a small hole in the middle, so I filled it with a Beesneez Elly and a ribbon at the centre of the piano. Most of what you hear is the Lulus.

They ran into a preamp built to order by Analogue Addicts, a one-man shop in the UK: a handmade copy of the REDD circuit from EMI's desks at Abbey Road, built around vintage valves. That combination became the sound of Lekko. I believe in committing to a choice, so there's no microphone-mix control in the plugin. You get the balance I settled on when setting the mics.

After that it came down to decisions. What to keep. What to leave out. And how to make one impossibly quiet piano fill a stage.

Afterglow: ghosts of the piano

The Afterglows barely sound like a piano at all. That's the point.

They're not effects bolted onto the acoustic patches. They're separate instruments, built from takes I recorded only to wreck, often with some movement already played in so the processing had something to chew on. What comes out is a faded memory of the piano. Sometimes something else entirely.

I made them with Hildur Guðnadóttir's Chernobyl score on repeat, and the cold air of the Annihilation soundtrack somewhere in the back of my head. What I love about that music is how it's built: layer on layer, acoustic sources pushed through electronics until you can't tell which is which. Lay a pitch-shifted voice under a lo-fi pad, run it through granular processing, and something happens that none of the parts promised.

Take a sound. Mangle it until it tells you where it's going. I keep no patch notes, on purpose, so I can never quite repeat myself.

The chains are always rather esoteric. A Dynacord VRS23, a strange reverb built from the BBD chips you'd normally find in delay units, dark and grainy and currently at my tech's, mid-repair for the past six months. An Echolette tube tape echo. The evergreen Mutable Instruments Clouds module.

Most patches involved tape too, either the Uher portable that's often called a poor man's Nagra, or a dictaphone when I wanted something really lo-fi. One of the most popular patches is the Half-Speed Sustains: the piano recorded to tape, then played back at half speed to stretch the transients out and make each note drift.

I'm particularly proud of two. Sunrise started as the tremolos, printed to cassette, then played back off a dictaphone a little slower, over and over, until almost nothing was left but a washed-out ghost. Push the mod wheel and a dirtier layer of that dictaphone creeps in. Underneath sits a sine tone recorded through a valve preamp, and on top, whatever was left after abusing a cassette. I don't remember what the source was by then. It had been through enough passes that it stopped mattering.

Tears In The Rain is what it says. I soaked the piano in tape delay, pushed it into a modular system, and modulated the whole thing with a recording of rain, so the downpour itself opens and closes the sound. You'll also hear some fragile vocals, kindly performed by my wife, Dorota. A chaotic, organic mess you couldn't build out of electronics alone.

Nearly all of the Afterglows respond to MPE, so every note bends and breathes under your fingers. Before I started the Afterglow work I discovered Slate + Ash Auras. I think they were the first to bring MPE to an ambient instrument like this, and the moment I heard it, I knew this was a path I wanted to take. I grabbed a little ROLI Seaboard Block and the MPE journey started.

A view from a distance

I've thought, more than once, about doing it again. I have a better signal chain now, and a proper studio instead of a corner of a flat. I even have a pair of Neumann KM-54s, the real ones, bought from Nils Frahm when he sold off some kit after All Melody.

Most artists would like to revisit their published work and bring it up to what they know now. And yet once it's out, it stays what it is. Lekko sounds like a piano in a small flat at 3 AM. Like cotton and cassette tape. An instrument that was never quite perfect. That's exactly why people reach for it.

It's ended up a mainstay in more studios than I expected, and after all this time, I still love it for what it is.

Lekko is the first instrument I made, and one I never meant to release. I built it to get around the fact that I'm not a pianist, and it taught me I didn't need to be. I have my piano, and I can play it however I hear it, sausage fingers included.

The trial lets you play most of the patches, free. Put your hands on the keys, as softly as you can. That's where it lives.