Sustaining the note on piano

[Manish25]

I started playing keyboard some months ago. While playing, I realized that a note on keyboard doesn't sustain for more than few seconds. But many songs have notes that last much longer than that. I have not been really happy with this as the music from keyboard does not sound like the song being played.

I searched on web to overcome this and came across a term - ADSR - and understood that what I want can be achieved through vsti software, else I will have to purchase an expensive keyboard (I play on yamaha psr e353).

I searched and downloaded Tracktion 5 and TAL-ELEK7ro and made them work together with my keyboard and experimented to understand that sustain can be achieved. BUT, the sound I hear is not at all of piano, but some mix of various electronic sounds.

Is there any way by which I can get good piano sound through these software, or I need something else? Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[happyrat1]

REAL pianos do NOT sustain indefinitely.

Whatever sound you are looking for in your head does not exist in the real world.

Gary

 

[Fred Coulter]

As for the length of a piano note, it depends on what the note is. Low notes sustain a lot longer than high notes. Most should last

more than few seconds

 

[Manish25]

Thanks to both happyrat1 and Fred for the response. But the answers are slightly contradictory.

My question was whether it is possible to get the sound I want through vsti and DAN softwares or not?

 

[scullen]

What sound are you trying to sustain? Piano? Organ? Other?

 

[happyrat1]

Again, it is not a sound which exists in nature. In theory, with a modern synthesizer it is possible to create any sound you can imagine.

Then again with a ROMpler type of VSTi or keyboard it's usually not doable to sustain a piano sound infinitely. If you try you get something else that's no longer a piano sound as your experiments have shown.

So if you can imagine it you might be able to create what you want with a modelling synthesizer, but don't even try to call it a piano any longer.

Gary

 

[Manish25]

Hello Everyone,

Again, thanks for the responses.

I will elaborate a bit.

I have a song that I like and would want to play on keyboard. In this, the singer has stretched a word for around 18 seconds, thrice, without any breathing in between. I then saw someone playing the same song on keyboard and he was able to play for a longer period (not sure if it was 18 seconds or not, but definitely more than 3-4 seconds).

Gary - after your comments, I did a bit of reading on piano and how it works. I read that there is a pedal called sostenuto pedal that raises the dampers, making the notes sound much longer. I have a sustain pedal with my keyboard, but I get just 3-4 seconds if I use that.

Is there any way by which the note can be stretched?

 

[Fred Coulter]

Of course you can stretch the sound longer, all the way to infinity. In your sampling software, set loop points for the sample very close together and make sure there's not an amplitude envelope pushing it to zero before the key is released. (You'll need to have sampling software and a keyboard that takes samples.)

The end product won't sound much like a piano, but it will sustain.

I do question the "only sustain for 3-4 seconds" though. I haven't timed it, but my piano sustains (actually, keeps sounding at a lower and lower level) for more than 3-4 seconds. What octave are you playing? As I said before, high notes don't last as long as low notes.

A different approach would be to layer two sounds. One of them, the piano, has the initial transients that people really listen for in a piano sound. The second sound has a slower attack, but an unlimited sustain. As the piano fades away, the other sound continues on. Just make sure the second sound works well with the piano. A lot of keyboards have a piano/strings patch just for that purpose.

 

[Fred Coulter]

But the answers are slightly contradictory.

I don't think so. All piano notes fade away over time. Perhaps I was being sloppy in my language. Use the word duration instead of sustain, and it may be clearer. That's the time between striking the note and its fading to inaudibility.

All piano notes fade over time. The length of the fade time varies with the note being played, with a very short time at the top of the keyboard, and a much longer time at the bottom of the keyboard. Your estimate of 2 seconds seems short compared to my experience, but may be true near the top of the keyboard. Generally, piano literature doesn't include measure long sustaining notes in the treble clef, just the bass clef, so I don't generally hold down piano notes at the top of the keyboard.

 

[Fred Coulter]

I read that there is a pedal called sostenuto pedal that raises the dampers, making the notes sound much longer.

Note exactly. When you depress a note on a piano, the damper for that note is raised. It stays raised until you release the note. The damper falling down is what stops the strings from vibrating, ending the sound of the note. Of course, while the note was playing it was getting quieter and quieter over time. At some point, even if you're holding down the note, it become inaudible.

The sostenuto pedal raises all the dampers, and keeps them up until the pedal is released. (Except for those notes that are still depressed when the pedal is released.) This means that the note you played will continue to slowly die even when you release the note. It also means that the harmonics of all your notes change because of sympathetic vibrations in other strings. But the difference in the length of time it takes a note to decay to inaudibility won't significantly change. (There will be a slight difference, because you'll get some lower notes to sympathetically vibrate, and they may take a little longer to die out, although they will be starting at a significantly lower volume than the note you played.)

 

[Fred Coulter]

I have a song that I like and would want to play on keyboard. In this, the singer has stretched a word for around 18 seconds, thrice, without any breathing in between. I then saw someone playing the same song on keyboard and he was able to play for a longer period (not sure if it was 18 seconds or not, but definitely more than 3-4 seconds).

The issue may be that you may be using the words piano and keyboard interchangeably. A piano is a specific type of keyboard, one that's in the percussion family. A hammer strikes the stings, and (like a drum) it makes a sound that decays to zero over time. An electronic keyboard's "piano" setting attempts to recreate this sound. But there are other keyboards that do sustain forever. The most famous is the organ, which has been replicated electronically from the earliest invention of the electronica keyboard.. Electronic keyboards can also replicate many other non-keyboard instruments that sustain as well as sounds which don't exist in nature, some of which sustain.

I've become confused by your question. Are you trying to make a piano sustain forever, or are you trying to get a sound played by a keyboard to sustain forever? If you're playing an electric piano with no other sounds and want it to sustain forever, you're using the wrong tool.

 

[Manish25]

Fred, I have a Yamaha portable keyboard, and I am playing that in Grand piano mode.

And what I gather from the discussions is that it is not possible to really stretch a note for long in that mode on keyboard.

 

[Fred Coulter]

Which keyboard? Some of the portables allow you to layer two sounds.

 

[Manish25]

I am not sure what you mean by layer, but the keyboard (yamaha psr e353) allows for dual voice.

 

[Fred Coulter]

That's what I mean. Use the dual voice feature, with one of the voices being the piano sound and the other voice being a sound that works well with the piano that does sustain. Strings is the traditional choice, but I'm sure you can come up with something more interesting.

 

[Manish25]

Thanks. I will try this.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Manish25-- I'm sorry for jumping in so late, but I wasn't following this thread and just started reading it.

(1) On an acoustic piano, the effect I believe you're describing is normally attained by using the damper pedal (the rightmost of the three piano pedals), also known as the sustain pedal. You can buy a compatible footswitch or pedal controller and plug it into the SUSTAIN jack on the back of your PSR-E353 (see pages 11 and 13 of the PSR-E353 Owner's Manual) so that you can sustain notes as on an acoustic piano. I don't know if a power adapter came with your keyboard (my understanding is that it's included only in some countries), but if you buy the compatible Survival Kit for your keyboard it will contain a footswitch, a power adapter, and a pair of cheap but serviceable headphones. Some people prefer a pedal controller over a footswitch, so if you already have a power adapter then you might want to just get a pedal controller.

(2) If you don't have a footswitch or pedal controller yet, the PSR-E353 also has a feature called "panel sustain" that will sustain the notes as though you were pressing down the sustain pedal while playing (see pages 18 and 41). The only way to access it is through the Function menu, as there is no button for it among the panel controls. However, its on/off setting is saved in the Registrations, so if you need to toggle it in or off quickly while playing then you could save two Registrations, one with the Panel Sustain turned on, and the other with the Panel Sustain turned off.

(3) Although the PSR-E353 doesn't have buttons, knobs, menu functions, or memory fields for changing and saving the EG (envelope generator) parameters, it does respond to MIDI messages for the Attack Time and Release Time. If you connect your keyboard to a computer, you can modify the keyboard's preset sounds by using a DAW or other MIDI software to send EG Attack/Release messages and LPF (low-pass filter) Cutoff/Resonance messages. You won't be able to save your "user voices" in the keyboard's Registrations, but you can save them in your DAW. And if you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch then you can connect your keyboard to it and use Yamaha's "Sound Controller" app to change the Attack/Release, Cutoff/Resonance, and other settings.

EDIT: Rereading the previous posts, I see that you already have a sustain pedal, and are trying to increase the length of the sustain. The only way I know to do this is to increase the Release value. As mentioned above, you can't do this on the keyboard itself, but you can do it via a DAW if you connect the keyboard to a computer, or via the Sound Controller app if you connect the keyboard to an iOS device. Additionally, cranking up the Reverb Depth can also help.

As for Fred's idea about layering two sounds together with the Dual function, besides a string voice you might want to also try layering the Acoustic Grand Piano with an electric piano or synth pad.

 

[Manish25]

Hi Michael,

First of all, many thanks for answering the post in so much detail. Let me see if I have understood your suggestions properly.

If I connect the keyboard with computer and the input goes to a DAW software (I have Tracktion 5), then the input sound would be modified based on DAW settings and the keyboard would play play them accordingly? Or do I have to output the sounds after processing to external speakers connected with computer? If this is the case, I have already tried and was getting the success in sustaining the tone for a longer time period, but the output that came was not at all like piano sound (I have used a plugin called TAL-Elek7ro-II to change the envelope in DAW). So I tried to pass the output from TAL-Elek7ro-II to another plugin called TruePianos , but in this case I did not get any output

Is my approach correct?

This is my current status. In the meanwhile, I will try Fred's idea.

Again, thanks for any suggestions.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I haven't tried it in Tracktion, but the general approach is to have Tracktion accept the MIDI coming from the keyboard, then send it back to the keyboard. If you do that, the keyboard will generate sounds for the MIDI data coming from Tracktion, so to avoid doubling the sound you would go into the keyboard's Function menu and turn the Local Control setting to Off. This means when you play on the keyboard, it won't make sounds for what you play, but the notes you play will go from the keyboard to Tracktion and back to the keyboard, which will then cause the notes to play. By doing this you can have Tracktion send additional MIDI messages to the keyboard for increasing the Release Time of the ADSR envelope, which will cause the notes to linger for a longer period when you play them.

 

[Manish25]

I have not been able to use Tracktion - I think will have to spend some time in figuring out which plug in to use as I could not see a direct option to modify release time. I then thought of using audacity and followed a YouTube video, but couldn't make keyboard sound within audacity. At the moment, I am just using dual voice while playing.