Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - Grand Piano or Virtual Piano?? Who Has Both???

Kiwiburger · 31st July 2008

I've played with many synth & software pianos, and they all pretty much blow chunks.

Even the expensive multi-gigabyte piano libraries are fundamentally flawed, and certainly not worth the disk space & system crashes. For these very simple reasons:

1 - For some reason, most people making piano libraries don't have good mic technique. I guess they are using a spaced pair usually, and end up with a gutless, phased out middle C. The middle is where the meat is, and I don't care that the bottom and top notes sound totally awesome if the middle sucks.

2 - mono compatibility is usually stink. Same reason as #1.

3 - there is a HUGE difference between playing piano chords one ONE piano, with all the strings interacting with each other and with ONE sounding board, in ONE ambiant space .... compared to LAYERING recordings of single played notes ... where there is no phase coherency between the recordings, and the ambiance stacks up like a bad comb filter ... can you see how wrong this is?

4 - triggering 'release' samples is a gross stupidity. Samplers don't have any way of knowing how long the note has been played for, and therefore don't know how loud the tail has decayed to ... so bringing in a sample at 'X' dB to finish of a note is always going to be wrong. It's just wrong. And NO, this has absolutely nothing to do with the velocity of a MIDI note off event ...

IMO - some dedicated digital pianos from the hardware experts (Roland, Kurzweil, Yamaha, etc) piss all over any software or sample library. Even if they only use mere megabytes of ROM - they have engineered things a lot better than most software libraries can (given current state of sampler formats). Even then - check mono compatibility if you care for useable mixes.

Things could be changing. I recently tried some software that modeled a piano extremely well. It used a few samples, but the core tone was completely virtual and well tweakable to taste. The velocity responded excellently - no rude shocks caused by dud samples - and all with a very small file size and CPU footprint.

Nothing's going to compete with those hoary old upright pianos from Abbey Road or whatever for olde worlde charm. They always pleased me far more than a perfect classical grand piano. But for big pop pianos, sometimes synthetic is perfectly pleasing.

31st July 2008	#17
Kiwiburger Lives for gear Joined: Feb 2006 Posts: 4,075	I've played with many synth & software pianos, and they all pretty much blow chunks. Even the expensive multi-gigabyte piano libraries are fundamentally flawed, and certainly not worth the disk space & system crashes. For these very simple reasons: 1 - For some reason, most people making piano libraries don't have good mic technique. I guess they are using a spaced pair usually, and end up with a gutless, phased out middle C. The middle is where the meat is, and I don't care that the bottom and top notes sound totally awesome if the middle sucks. 2 - mono compatibility is usually stink. Same reason as #1. 3 - there is a HUGE difference between playing piano chords one ONE piano, with all the strings interacting with each other and with ONE sounding board, in ONE ambiant space .... compared to LAYERING recordings of single played notes ... where there is no phase coherency between the recordings, and the ambiance stacks up like a bad comb filter ... can you see how wrong this is? 4 - triggering 'release' samples is a gross stupidity. Samplers don't have any way of knowing how long the note has been played for, and therefore don't know how loud the tail has decayed to ... so bringing in a sample at 'X' dB to finish of a note is always going to be wrong. It's just wrong. And NO, this has absolutely nothing to do with the velocity of a MIDI note off event ... IMO - some dedicated digital pianos from the hardware experts (Roland, Kurzweil, Yamaha, etc) piss all over any software or sample library. Even if they only use mere megabytes of ROM - they have engineered things a lot better than most software libraries can (given current state of sampler formats). Even then - check mono compatibility if you care for useable mixes. Things could be changing. I recently tried some software that modeled a piano extremely well. It used a few samples, but the core tone was completely virtual and well tweakable to taste. The velocity responded excellently - no rude shocks caused by dud samples - and all with a very small file size and CPU footprint. Nothing's going to compete with those hoary old upright pianos from Abbey Road or whatever for olde worlde charm. They always pleased me far more than a perfect classical grand piano. But for big pop pianos, sometimes synthetic is perfectly pleasing.