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Comment by jdormit | Hacker News Reader

Whoa! Super cool, and masterfully played. I would love to get some more details on the tech involved though - how was the visualization created? How much of it is added to the video in post-processing and how much is real-time (it seemed like the actual lights on the piano keys was real-time but the Guitar-hero style scrolling lights were post-processing)?

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Me too, I'd love a behind the scenes explaining the setup a little. I dug around, but didn't find anything.

The guitar-hero thing looks a lot like Synthesia[1], so could very well be that, but the lightup keys look like they're done using LED's.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesia

Thank you! I've been looking for this for ages.

They attach an RGB strip slightly above the keys on top of the keyboard (or for a grand piano/upright, they attach it probably somewhere on the key case).

Rousseau has been teaching a lot of other pianists how to do the same setup, so you can kind of see how its done in this other great piano youtuber, funguypiano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyQj7T6uLII

Then you obviously need some sort of bird's eye camera so that you can synchronize it with Synthesia.

Then you go into After Effects and add all the pretty colors and particle effects.

Sometimes they get fancy and add some RGB programming so that colors are changed on a beat by beat basis.

Thanks for this!! Much appreciated.

Added: Thoms Mucenieks has a similar setup, which his recent 1M sub video makes it pretty obvious how its setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qWg6Y-Ildc

Yamaha (and probably others) sell pianos with light up displays and keys to help people learn to play piano. Probably most snobs will tell you it’s a terrible way to learn and you’re not going to sound any good playing the piano like guitar hero. It’s a $5k toy to try to get someone interested in thinking about learning to play.

$5k? Try $150. jb hifi in Australia sells a Casio that does this for AU$200.

https://www.jbhifi.com.au/casio/casio-lk135/900135/

Why is this post prefixed with I - Jacques Mattheij (op) is not Rousseau (the video with 3.5 million views)

So you will not get an answer.

We assume the headlines are supplied by the original content creator, unless it's an Ask HN or Show HN.

When I see "Watch Out Google, YouTubers are unionizing" I don't think that's pseudolus saying that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20696702

That was the original title of the video, lifted from elsewhere, I had absolutely no intention of passing this off as my own.

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