Keyboard Sound For Gyms

April 22nd, 2012
contra, ideas, music
It's very hard to get good sound for contra dance music in a gym. What with the size of the hall and the amount of reflective surfaces it's always really boomy and muddy. Fixing this is very difficult, especially at folk festival pricing, but when we did our Childgroove set (where Amy sets the keyboard to synth and rocks out on bass) at DownEast we had people come up to us to say the synth sounded really good in the hall (a gym). Something about that electric piano sound helped it come through better.

Listening to Julie playing with La Banane Enchantee at NEFFA this afternoon, I was thinking: could you make a 'piano' sound optimized for a noisy gym? Designing it with that in mind it you should be able to make something that sounds much better in that situation.

You could even go one step further and do this as a computer program that also takes in a mic from the hall and dynamically creates the optimal keyboard sound for the environment it happens to be in.

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