I have a niece called Emily, she's 11 and she can read music notation and play the piano that is really quite complex in arrangement, she does have a music teacher who helps her but it's pretty impressive how good she is. Reading music for me was never my thing, not because I didn't appreciate other pre written compositions, I just desired to make my own and find my own way there to create something know one else had that was unique to me.
I am right handed but after a while my left hand began to work intuitively without the need to look at the keys which at the time was really quite satisfying but also it felt like a natural progression. It just takes lots of practice, it may take a few months but it's worth it because once you learn to play with two hands, you will never forget it, but that doesn't mean you won't get rusty if you stop practicing for a long period of time.
You really need at least 61 Keys to learn on, not just because you have an extra octave or two but because you have more freedom for your arms to move around the physical space.
Once you learn to play fluently, and not just draw notes and twiddle knobs your music will be so much easier to produce and it's so much more fun too.
If you really want to power drive your music playing skills, set a time limit on how long you can continue to play non stop without making any errors or key fluffs. When you start out it's good to know just where your fingers are on the keyboard and will help you memorise what keys make what sounds. Once you have a good grasp of that and feel confident enough, take the next step of minimising how often you look at the keys, then follow up with not looking at any and just follow the notes you record on screen.
Many of my piano tracks including a few on soundclick like Dual Escapism and Aftershock were produced in exactly this way (live without stopping for the whole duration). Sure there are pauses between each section but my mind was working two or three times faster to work out the next section.
Before you even go for it, it's best I find to let you self free play, making mistakes, it doesn't matter, find new chords, find new melodies and build some sort of picture of how you would like to incorporate those idea's.
For the actual piano sounds if you don't already have the props commercial Piano Refill or any others that sound good, the built in soundbank has the perfect alternative and it sounds pretty authentic.
Create a combinator, a line mixer and 'A Grand Piano 1.0sxt for the NNXT and add a touch of release (8 to 12)if you like the sustain effect, if not using a foot sustain pedal. Add a RV7000 loading the default AllC1 Mid Hall preset and (set Dry/Wet knob to no more than +32) with the NNXT selected and then add a MClass Equalizer with the R7000 selected. Enable PARM 2 of the MClass Equalizer and set the FREQ knob to the 3 O'clock position (8.351 Khz) then the GAIN to about the 3 O'clock position or slightly over it ( 13.4dB ). Then finally set the bottom knob of the three to about the 9 O'clock position ( 1.9 ).
What you should have with this is a pretty realistic representation of a real Piano. You could of course raise the dry and wet knob but you don't want to drown it too much in it.
Here's the combinator as described above.
Download Piano scottym combi
