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I have always gone down the light chorus/phaser > short delay > reverb route ; which sounds good and all but does anyone have any other suggestions?

My piano always sounds a bit 'too' dark, I want to brighten it up.

light bitcrushing and saturation. reverb. filter?

high shelf EQ, most of the guts of the piano will be below 4kHz so you want to boost above that, say 6 or 7kHz, let your ears decide obviously.

the route you chose is also perfectly appropriate OP.

personally i would never use distortion effects on such a tone-rich instrument as a piano but that's just me.

p.s. this is all written under the assumption that your using a synthesized or sampled piano rather than recording one.

I'm using TruePianos which I think is sampled? I have never actually looked haha!

The boost at 6-7k sounded GREAT though! thanks!

Wait...obviously you're talking about a very different tone than I thought you were. I would have lowpassed it, rather than boosting the highs. So dis-count what I said.

If the high shelf eq isn't doing it for you, using a brighter sounding piano is of course the obvious answer. Perhaps dig around in the upper end of the spectrum with a lowpass filter with the resonance cranked right up.

Other than that you could try sending to an aux and putting a pitchshifter set to +12 semitones followed by a reverb. Maybe severely high passing the piano's reverbs/delays auxes. Or high pass a copy of the piano and saturate/overdrive to taste.

depends on the sound you want. if it's a real piano, there's often some midrange resonance that gets really pronounced; finding that and taking it down can help clear things up.

otherwise i tend to like really chunky VCA or FET compression on a piano-- gets it thick and sitting nicely in the mix. I rarely want it sparkly and verby; if i do, i'll just use a roland sample, no processing.

try an exciter for brightening, or some nice bright reverb. mid/side eqing as well maybe