Ableton Forum

I did a search and actually came across a few useful tips on how to make a nice piano sound (use of pedal, reverb, filtering higher frequencies to be quieter, etc).
But I can’t quite get it, it seems. Particularly, in the project I’m working on, the piano plays a low part for quite some time. I want to create some tension and make the song build for a few minutes then bring in a percussive chord part – loud and epic sounding. An example would be nice I know, but I hope you get the idea of the sound I want. As a loose example, Explosions in the sky come to mind. Not necessarily for the piano sounds but the build up ? in your face epic part. Right now, all parts just blend in and sound lifeless.

Any help is appreciated!

PS. A lot of my questions and searches on this forum do not directly relate to Ableton Live (although that’s my only tool) but to production/use of effects like compressors/mixing/sound design. A lot of them are quite basic also. Almost all topics here are Ableton specific and quite advanced. Anyone know of a good forum where I can ask these ‘general’ questions?

general questions at ableton.com forum the help and stickies cover much that is asked here

try putting some of the evil sounding arpeggiators in front of your virtual piano, it should add all kinds of tension to it..

The most important is to start with a good piano sound. If you start with a poor sampled piano, it's hard to make it more than it is. But if you have a very lively and well produced piano-library (or well miced real thing), then it will be 2309823 times more interesting to listen to, even without the epic producing. Needless to say it's easier to get where you want after getting this right.

luckily ableton just released about a million different piano instruments which you can buy

http://kvraudio.com

that forum would probably be of much more use.

if you need a lot of dynamics and expression effects, physically modelled pianos, such as Pianoteq tend to respond better and are playable at lower latencies than sampled based pianos such as the ones in EIC and the piano packs for Live and Kontakt, or the likes of Synthogy's popular 'Ivory' range etc.