[CentOS] Recording piano and voice

Tue Jun 23 18:25:33 UTC 2015
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>

On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 11:14:08 -0600
Frank Cox <theatre at melvilletheatre.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 10:15:35 -0400
> Lamar Owen wrote:
> 
> > The USB MIDI port won't give you audio, just MIDI text.
> 
> That's what I thought.  To this point, I've never done anything MIDI
> and I really don't know much about that; I just use my piano for the
> purpose of playing the piano.

MIDI is used to translate your piano keystrokes into a digital format a
computer can understand. You play on the keyboard, and the computer
outputs the score of what you are playing, so that you don't need to
write the score by hand. :-) That sort of thing.
 
> I think I will try to do this with Audacity as Fred Smith suggested.
> If I record the speaking part first, I can then somehow play it back
> and record the piano track while listening to the voice track to get
> the timing right.  What I'm doing doesn't really have a beat or
> rhythm like a song -- it's a dramatic reading, but some of the words
> have a note or chord to sound along with them so getting it
> coordinated will be the challenge.

Record first whatever has less silence --- if the piano part is
continuous, record that first. Usually words have silence in between,
and can be cut and shifted around (slightly) to match the piano. But if
the piano is intermittent, record the voice first, and then cut&paste
piano parts later, as you would with a sound effect.

Either way, for best results some dubbing and some tuning with Audacity
will be unavoidable. :-)

HTH, :-)
Marko