I love the sound of the Felt Piano, but it’s so full of phase issues, extremely quiet (I have to boost it by 16 dB to get to -6 dB; main track and master is at 0 dB in the Scaler mixer), and tilts significantly to the right in the stereo panorama. Could you please check what’s going on?
Hey @root66 Welcome to the forum.
The Felt Piano is a stereo sound and recorded with stereo mics. The intention is to have movement between left and right. There is no phase issues or volume issues - its as intended and comes up as -6dB for me which is ideal.
Put it in mono. Does it sound ok to you? Then there’s no phase issue. Im always skeptical of using our eyes and meters when working with sound.
For example, if I only play the note B3 with the builtin piano keys, I clearly hear the bright sound on the right, while the left is quieter (Right: -14.52 dB vs Left: -17.17 dB True Peak). That should be the stereo recording. But if I switch to mono, the bright part disappears, and the overall sound becomes quieter. This is the result of the numerous phase cancellations visible in my original post. The red bars are phase cancellations.
Thanks for sharing those detailed measurements. What you’re hearing is consistent with how the Felt Piano was recorded: it’s a stereo instrument, captured with stereo mics, and designed to have some movement and character between the left and right channels. Because Scaler 2/3 doesn’t have multi-sample functionality, I wanted to provide something simple to implement but still musical and nice.
When you sum any stereo felt style piano or multi-sample library to mono, you’ll usually notice a tonal change or drop in level due to natural phase interactions. That’s not a recording fault - just a byproduct of stereo mic’ing. A correlation meter can sometimes exaggerate this, whereas a goniometer is a clearer way to assess stereo image and energy.
In practice, the Felt Piano has been used across plenty of commercial tracks that get summed in different playback systems and it holds up well. So while the readings may look unusual on a meter, if it sounds good in context then that’s what really matters.