Stella by Starlight - duet with myself (piano & guitar)

**Fruitboom** · 02-04-2025, 03:17 PM

Hi all,

Second recording post on this forum. Thanks for all the inspiration you offer by posting your own music. Makes feel like sharing more.

I recorded an arrangement of Stella by Starlight - recording a piano comping part, and playing a lead guitar part over it.

Hope you like it! Any comments or critiques are very welcome!

Cheers,

Jan.

**2bornot2bop** · 02-04-2025, 09:46 PM

Real admirable comping effort on the Piano! I enjoyed the variety of the walking bass line along with the use of some lush chords. That’s what Piano is all about. You’re off to a great start!

**Ingo Lee** · 02-05-2025, 01:19 PM

Very nice Fruitboom. Good playing and sound. Like 2bop said, your comping choices work well here to my ear. It's very cool that you play two instruments so well and that they complement each other. Which instrument did you learn first? I think I'd try some different eq choices to maybe change the blended sound but that's just me, good work!

**Fruitboom** · 02-06-2025, 02:24 AM

Thanks for the comments!

Started out on a small keyboard when I was eight -that grew into a piano. Added the guitar in my teens (I´m mid-40s now). Abandoned the guitar for 15 years, took it up during the pandemic.

@Ingo Lee Could you elaborate a bit? I´m pretty new to recording, and I just roll with the default sound of My Kawai piano, and the sound from my amp. To separate the sounds, I currently just pan one slighly to the right, and the other to the left. It would be nice to learn about EQing.

Thanks!
Jan.

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**Ingo Lee** · 02-06-2025, 01:39 PM

Originally Posted by Fruitboom

Thanks for the comments!

Started out on a small keyboard when I was eight -that grew into a piano. Added the guitar in my teens (I´m mid-40s now). Abandoned the guitar for 15 years, took it up during the pandemic.

@Ingo Lee Could you elaborate a bit? I´m pretty new to recording, and I just roll with the default sound of My Kawai piano, and the sound from my amp. To separate the sounds, I currently just pan one slighly to the right, and the other to the left. It would be nice to learn about EQing.

Thanks!
Jan.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-A515F met Tapatalk

Your sound here is very good Jan so nothing else is needed really. I can kind of tell you haven't done much mixing to this track and that may well be the best treatment, it's all subjective. Recording is a deep subject and I'm no expert by any means. If you'd like to discuss it more maybe you could tell me what DAW you are using and what your signal path is for both instruments?

**Fruitboom** · 02-07-2025, 03:29 PM

Originally Posted by Ingo Lee

Your sound here is very good Jan so nothing else is needed really. I can kind of tell you haven't done much mixing to this track and that may well be the best treatment, it's all subjective. Recording is a deep subject and I'm no expert by any means. If you'd like to discuss it more maybe you could tell me what DAW you are using and what your signal path is for both instruments?

Any advice would be really appreciated!

In fact, both instruments go directly into Garageband.

Epiphone guitar -> Yamaha THR10 II USB out -> Garageband

Kawai -> record to USB -> import in Garageband

I do have an interface, as well: Evo 4.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-A515F met Tapatalk

**Ingo Lee** · 02-07-2025, 08:14 PM

That's a great setup Jan, you can do almost anything with that and the cost is very affordable. Obviously there's a lot of options out there that might benefit you but you can do great recordings with what you have.

I've never used Garageband but there's plenty of tutorial stuff online so I'll just give you a general overview. Again with the disclaimer that I'm no expert and a lot of this is my opinion only.

The recording goals for jazz musicians vary but the traditional approach is to try and get an accurate recorded version of a 'live' performance. Ideally you'd have acoustic instruments in a great sounding room with a number of quality microphones carefully placed. Any modifications to the recorded sound would be minimal and done with the intent of preserving the original acoustic sound.

We don't have that setup but it's useful to have that goal in mind. So the first step is to get some tracks that are not too quiet or bouncing too close to the red zone of your VU meters. Then the 'mixing' process begins and there might be a lot to that but I'll just talk about eq.

EQ devices give you a graphic image of a sound wave and allow you to shape that wave to improve the sound. Your EQ device will offer you presets which you should experiment with. Generally we try and eliminate very high and very low frequencies because they don't often give us the sound we want. Then we apply some more gentle shaping to the middle frequencies. These can be just tone control type settings or perhaps we want to keep certain keyboard tones from 'interfering' with certain guitar tones or vice versa. A lot of experimentation is useful here, you're looking for a 'blend' that you like.

Since there is a lot more to mixing than just eq I'll leave you with one suggestion that will help, and that is to use a reference track. A reference track is a professionally recorded track that is as close as possible to the track that you are working with. You import it so that you can do close 'A-B' comparisons between the pro track and your own. Then you figure out how to get the sounds of your track as close as possible to the pro track. What's missing? Maybe nothing! Good ear training, and fun too.

Here's a short recording of one of my humble efforts (not intended to be your reference track!)

C minor melody Mix 1.10.mp3