Lucent's Guide to Online Sequencer

Welcome to Lucent Guide v1.2! This site was last updated on September 21, 2022. Site is currently on hiatus indefinitely.

Piano Texturing

Preface

Original Text: Online Sequencer's pianos are versatile instruments across the board, however, as standalones they may feel artificial after a while. Especially if you're making a piano song—it's particularly difficult to express dynamics and intonation as you would with a real life piano.

By precisely blending instruments together, you can compensate for the lack of velocity on the sequencer. It may not help much for sustaining notes, but it's an improvement over the bland sound quality. For more important projects, it's worth the effort to practice this technique!

Note: As of the 11/22/20 update, Secret Piano has been added to the roster of regular instruments. Secret Piano supports sustain and can be used in conjunction with individual note volumes introduced in the 11/26/20 update. It is currently the most realistic instrument that can be used for piano roles.

While it may be impractical to recreate a piano font from scratch, the information in this article should be seen as an extension of the Note Stacking tutorial. I've used piano as an example instrument, however, these concepts below can be applied to just about anything.

As you work with your sequences, you should start thinking about additive instrument qualities rather than the limitations of individual instruments. Becoming more creative on the site means to let go of the logical mindset that instruments have to sound a certain way—or realistic to their name.

Secret Piano is a solid all-purpose instrument, but you may still have uses for the other pianos. Let's go over how we can improve those.

Instruments

Different instruments have different timbres—or sound qualities—that are appropriate to use in different situations. I will explain them below.

Electric Piano is the brightest out of all the pianos. It can be used to highlight specific voices or to express dramatic sections. The clarity on Electric Piano also makes it viable for quick keyboard phrases to sound sharp and punchy.

Electric Piano is clean across the entire piano roll, therefore one shouldn't have problems with quality control when incorporating it into your sequences. The only drawback to Electric Piano is that it can come off too flat when used alone.

Grand Piano is a mellow counterpart of Electric Piano. Rich mid registers and strong low registers evoke power, while high-registers are soft and delicate. Under many circumstances, Grand Piano can also serve as a bass for its higher attack.

Its strong range of harmonics makes Grand Piano suitable for slow-paced songs that focus on dynamics but less suitable for high BPM songs that focus on sound quality. As much as possible, please refrain from using Reverb on Grand Piano as it can clutter sound space very easily.

Ragtime Piano is a special chorused piano font. It's difficult to describe when exactly to use Ragtime, but it's generally appropriate when you don't want to use either Electric or Grand Piano. The key characteristic of Ragtime is its specific flavor. It's similar to adding lemon juice to food to make the dish more vibrant in a technical way.

Ragtime's clarity is lined somewhere between the two main pianos. It lacks bass frequency harmonics, but higher frequencies are subdued (which get more noticeable the higher you play them). Ragtime Piano's quality benefits the most from using Reverb—which emphasizes the distant nature of the instrument.

Jazz Guitar may seem like a strange decision, but it is a fairly versatile instrument. Its ambiguous sound quality blends well with many instruments and can be used as ghost notes that aren't voiced very well in chords. For those who are compositionally inclined, this should give you more liberty incorporating more notes without having them sound too terrible.

Step-by-step Process

Now that you get some idea about why you should use certain instruments, let's get into how we should use them.

1. Have a piano draft.

Draft out your piano song if you don't have one already. I recommend using either Electric or Grand Piano, depending on which one suits the overall mood of your song best.

2. Start replacing individual notes with a different instrument.

For Electric Piano, consider keys that you would push harder on a real life piano. These tend to make more pungent sounds.

For Grand Piano, choose keys that are less spiky to the ears or use on low-register keys that need natural boom.

Using Ragtime Piano is very situational and wherever you use it is an artistic choice.

Lastly, use Jazz Guitar for subdued keys or for the keys you "hear in your head" that are not very prominent. You can see that compared to the original sequence, there are Jazz Guitar notes that have been added outside of the skeleton.

3. Use Note Stacking to adjust power and texture.

Original Text: You can use basic note stacking dynamics to emphasize certain voices or general segments.

Instrument blending is also applicable and you can work from hybrid piano combinations to get what you want. For example, blending Electric Piano and Grand Piano as a general instrument has a rich flavor of its own.

Jazz Guitar also does a particularly good job at softening Grand Piano without using Reverb. This is good if you want to use Grand Piano for more delicate sections but keep other sections that use it dramatically unaffected.

Ragtime Piano can be occasionally dispersed onto harsh notes—where Electric Piano is less applicable.

Note: You may now update the individual note volume by selecting a note and using Alt+Scroll to fill the volume bar (as compared in the right image). It is more convenient to decrease the volume of notes this way, but some may still be accustomed to the archaic method of note stacking. If you don't have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can also use Alt+-.

4. Test out different volume and effects parameters.

Original Text: Use volume to adjust the presence of a single instrument in the textured piano. For example, when using Electric and Grand Piano, you can turn down Electric Piano to make the notes sound sharper—while preventing the chorused effect from stacking the two together.

Delay is used for atmospheric piano and can be used on Electric Piano to make the sequence sound more full.

These are just some examples of how to use the Instruments panel of OS. Keep experimenting and find a combination that suits you!

Note: Using EQ may help you refine a custom piano font by adjusting the presence of frequency groups for an instrument. You can learn about EQ here.

Additional Notes for Piano Texturing

Individual note volume is not equivalent to velocity. Velocity also encompasses the change in timbre when a note is played harder or more softly, whereas changing the volume does not affect the instrument's quality at all. OS does not have the ability to change note velocities—only their volume.

I have kept the terminology consistently accurate throughout the guide. From here on, I will refer the parameter being altered from using Alt+Scroll as individual note volume, while I will refer to the basic concept of making things louder/softer as using dynamics.

Here is another sequence that makes use of piano texturing. Piano texturing tends to be more practical for detailing downbeat songs.

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