How to Make a Piano Sample Library: The Editing Process in Pro Tools

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In this episode, Carson Bruce introduces his newly released piano sample library featuring five sampled pianos with both regular and felt versions across 10 unique patches. He also begins a new series showing the full process of building a piano sample library from scratch. From recording setups and microphone choices to piano selection and room acoustics, Carson shares the essential tools and workflow behind professional sampling. The episode also takes viewers inside a real upright piano sampling session at Miller Piano Specialists in Franklin, Tennessee, where he captures a Ritmüller upright using multiple microphones and velocity layers. Future episodes will cover editing, cleanup, and bringing the final library to life.

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Hear the full piano sample library on Spotify

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Worship Keys podcast. My name is Carson Bruce. We talk all things music theory, gear, industry, and ministry for your worship keys playing. I'd like to thank Aerospace Audio for being a sponsor of this episode. They create unique incredible high quality atmospheric drone pads to be used for your worship services, productions, songwriting sessions, whatever it may be. They have an analog physical drone pedal that they call atmosphere. There's actually a version three out. They also have a MIDI end capability, so you can work in tandem with Ableton Live or any other dog that you have to be able con to control everything through that ecosystem. Or if not the physical analog pedal. They also have an iOS app that you can run the pad straight from your iPhone or iPad. It's called Aero Pads. Definitely check them out, aerospace audio.com and let's get into today's episode. So here we go in the editing process. So I have Pro Tools session open right here. This is the exact, session that I just used to record at Miller Piano Specialist whenever I recorded a few pianos there. This recording session is when I recorded the Kaiser Berg piano. So I'm just gonna take you through my whole editing process of these, so that you can do what you want to with them. If there's a better process to how to do this, feel free to comment. Let me know. But this is just my way of editing them. All right, so the first thing that I wanna do before I begin any work is I want to save as, and name this editing. You can name it, mixing, editing. Whatever you want to, I'm gonna name this demo just for our sake editing demo. Alright, so once you have your new session completely saved, separate, uh, then you're good to go. The reason why you want to do this is because if you mess up, then you can always go back to your original recorded session. Alright, so in this particular recording we used basically three different tracks here. CADs, which are Stereo Pair Rode which is a stereo pair up close, which was just the up close mono microphone that we had. Alright, so the first thing that I want to do is just a little bit of organization stuff. Here. I wanna highlight everything, shift option, and you can do what you want to with this. But right now I'm just kind of zooming in and out to kind of see everything as a whole so what I'm gonna do, instead of going to playlist, I'm gonna change this to waveform. I'm gonna change the track height instead of small, I'm gonna go to large and alright, then I'm gonna go to my first playlist. So if you go shift up or down arrows, you can actually change your playlist altogether. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go to probably let's go the softest version, the softest velocity. And here we go. We're just gonna kinda listen down. And the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to get the room noise out of the recording before I splice, before I separate the transients before I do anything, and just kinda listen down and see what I have. And, I'm going to try to eliminate the noise. And we're just gonna listen down and you'll hear room noise as we do this. All right, so as you can hear, there's some room noise here. So go to inserts, plug in noise reduction RX eight D noise. Again, you might have RX 10 or there might be a newer version by the time you see this video. So yeah, here we have RX dno. And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna make these adjustments real quick. I want to reduce it all the way here. That's the threshold level. Let's go gentle, and since this is not dialogue, this is music, uh, adaptive mode, which is great. I like to do that. Uh, you can play around with it, according to how your samples sound, but I'm just gonna kinda do this and see what it does. I'm gonna solo up the CADs here just to hear what it does on this channel. Nice. I like how that is. Nice, yeah, I like that. It's gentle. It's in the music threshold. Again, your settings will change. Your threshold and reduction settings can change according to your own room and how you recorded your piano. But I like that. So basically once you get a good profile of your noise, you can do the same for the rest of your tracks and put 'em in all of your channels. Or you can have a master bus and put it on your master bus, um, and get the noise reduction just from the master bus, which is a great idea as well. But yeah, just kinda use whatever settings you want to use. Whatever sounds good is good. And I did it on the softest velocity layer, by the way. 'cause if you do it on the loudest one, uh, you might get a false sense of that threshold point. And you might have to adjust the threshold point according to your velocity layers. But you don't want to change your RXD noise levels according to the different velocities, because then you're gonna get different noise coming in at different velocity layers in your final sample library. So once you get the softest setting set, keep that for all of your sounds. I then want to clean up all of the transients. The easiest way to do that, that I've learned is to use tab to transient. All right? So what you'll wanna do, uh, for tab to transient is make sure all three channels are selected. And to make sure this little button up here on the top left is selected and all you gotta do is when you press tab over, it'll tab to your nearest transient. And on my MacBook here, I'm just gonna command e It goes ahead and splices it for me. Tab over. Now it's getting this up close mic. 'cause I moved it. I don't wanna cut there. I want to cut right there. And this can be a fairly fast process, uh, for you. Cut. Cut. Again, I'm doing this in real time, so you kind of see the actual timing of this. It doesn't matter if these are gonna be your final samples or not, all you're doing is just going to the transients and cutting them. We will clean them up later, but for now, we're just tabbing over, splicing them up. So this could take a little while. Just depends. On how many tracks you have, how many samples you did in your piano sample library. Again, I'm not even listening to any of the sources right now. I'm just finding those transients and I am cutting them. So, um, those are all cut right there. What I want to do once I have these cut is I want to go to, every velocity layer and do the same thing. So, um, for the sake of time, I'm just gonna speed up this process and I'm not going to show me to doing this in real time. I'm just gonna speed up so you can save some time. Okay. So we're back. Just for the sake of time, that was not in real time, but it did take me about 20 minutes to tab to transient all of the transients of all the velocity layers, layers, both in my felt piano and my regular piano sample libraries. For me, my felt piano versus my regular piano. The sound design, uh, that I had, the same settings that I had in RX isotopes, uh, Deno. They were the same setting for each. So that was great. Mainly because it was the same room, so it was the same profile for you. That might be the case as well, but it also might not be. So definitely, you know, be careful of that. The next thing that we'll want to do, once we have all the transients cut, we will want to then clean up all of the samples. So what I suggest to do is to. Go here and make sure to save off and of course. I'm just going to highlight all these and then I'm gonna start put cutting off. See there's some audio here at this up close soft where I was moving that mic around. So that must have meant that the, the file is down. So I'm gonna go ahead and put a little slight fade, at the end of these. All right, and later when we listen down, we'll probably have to do a little fade right here. But my suggestion is to wait on that fade at the beginning and just get the ends, get the tail end. Get off first. Using shift to do all of them at the same time. Definitely take your time in this process because if you go too fast, what you might end up happening, like what happened to me, is you go to program into your sampler and realize a lot of your samples or some of your samples aren't quite as good as the others. And if you would've just taken the extra 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes to clean up these samples correctly, you wouldn't have had that problem. Later on. So, you know, if you put in all the work ahead of time now, then you won't have to worry about having to go back later and open up this session when you're already long gone process, uh, past this process. So definitely take your time right at the beginning and get it right the first. So basically that's all it is for the editing process. Clean up the room sound. Uh, clean up your samples. Keep more than you need at the beginning. And then the next, the next part is exporting all these samples into an organized folder. Alright, so once you have your clips finalized and cleaned up with all the room noise and everything's as clear as it can be, what you want to do is go back to all of your different playlists, starting with the first one you did on soft and you want to rename all the clips to be exactly how you want it to be so it stays organized. So a good thing to do is go to a piano and write down the note values, what they're called, just so you're not confused and have it all written down. So when you go to re relabel it, you don't have to keep thinking about the piano and where the notes are. So I just jotted down. The note values where they are in the piano. And this is my list and so on, on every playlist, I'll go through these and just relabel all the clips according to this list. So, that's what I'm gonna do now as the final step here. All right, so I'm all done renaming all the clips, and I'm glad I went through that. It took me a total of 37 minutes, which was longer than what I expected to take. Re renaming all the clips, but it was necessary. And in doing so, I caught a few mistakes along the way, uh, that I had. So it was good. It was good to be diligent. It's good to take your time, get everything