How to not make a piano piece sound like absolute garbage

[Necrox]

I've written this piece as the credit theme for a short film and the director loves it but jeez does it sound terrible. Despite spending hours tweaking velocities, EQing (internal/external), and trying different reverbs, I can't seem to get the "soft" tone I'm going for.

How can I make this workable? NI Grandeur with on-board reverb.

 

[Nabeel Ansari]

First of all, it's too compressed, but secondly, the velocities DO need some work. If you've ever recorded playing piano into a DAW, you'd notice a lot of velocities are like... really low. Like below 80.

There's some parts that don't really sound like they're phrased. You need to keep an idea of what are the dominant musical ideas happening. Harmonic rhythmic support needs to be quieter than melodies and short little phrases and any other kind of linear motion you're trying to bring out. Sometimes you have these long stretch of harmonic changes like at 1:50 but it doesn't sound like there's any long term planning on how the pianist is managing the phrasing. Crescendo over the whole thing? Or maybe crescendo certain patterned parts of it? Now when I say crescendo, I DON'T mean just do straight up lines in the velocities. You still have to manage the balance of voices (top to bottom, what's the prominent line, etc)

I hear nothing, no kind of handling the musical ideas, and this is just not how people perform music. They're always doing something, they're not just playing the notes measure to measure.

If you can send me a MIDI of the part at 1:50, I can perform it for you and show you what I mean.