I used to collect keys. They look cool, they don’t take up a huge amount of space, and there’s endless variety. Given I have limited space I don’t have as much of a passion for it anymore. Eventually, I want a wall of keys.

Between my iRig and my M-AUDIO I have 125 keys. That’s a good start. Could say that with my laptop keyboard I have another 78. 203, excluding any house keys.

I spent more time on one instrument yesterday. This time, rather than throwing down notes I started wondering how I could change how it could sound.

So I started looking at a few options. All of the following can be found in this tutorial.

• Attack
• Reverb
• Room
• Gain

At what percentage does this sound good? Terrible? Do I even hear a difference?

I know what kind of sound I want. Describing it is often difficult because although I feel the same way about sounds as I feel about colours and tastes and touch, I don’t always have the words or bridge for them. Partially because identifying each note in a piece feels like identifying individual ingredients in a recipe, or individual chemical components. I can, but it doesn’t give us the full picture of how they interact. Saying “I’m making a curry” is different to “I’m making a garam masala-ginger-garlic-turmeric-fennel-chili-cinnamon-cardamom-coconut milk-tomato base.” Or whatever ingredients work for you.

The thing is that once I start getting into it, it’s fun twiddling around the sounds and listening to what sounds good to me, but I still need to do more research. I don’t just want to find the sounds I want. I want to be sure that I understand what makes it that way, rather than “I clicked things until this happened and it’s fine.” That’s not learning so much as accidentally a piece. Technically it’s random element, but perhaps a bit too random to me.

It’s not so hard to open Ableton as it was, and changing around the attack, the velocity,  the room an instrument is in, is pretty sweet. It’s like trying to create the taste of an apple synthetically. You won’t get an absolute spot on match to all apples, but you can get an approximation of that organic experience. That said, occasionally when you get an apple that tastes exactly like synthetic apple flavour, it’s a trip.

In this case it would be hearing a grand piano in a room. I wanted it to sound a bit more like the piano I grew up listening to. My room is right over the study where my dad practices piano, and I would go to sleep at night hearing that. It was lovely. I may not get it exactly right, but a little reverb in a constant hall, bringing down the hardness and a few other options makes all the difference.

I haven’t finalised all settings yet, but I will share fully when I have.

In the mean time, what kind of keys do you have?