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Hello everyone,
I had the occasion to try the V-piano and I'd like to point out several critique arguments hoping the next models or software updates will improve these aspects.
So first of all bear in mind I like the very idea of physical modeling and I think this is a good piano, though Roland has to address many points - IN MY VIEW - to improve it. This is not a "review" on the piano, and I'm not trying to throw crap on this great instrument.
Alright, the model was the first to come to the music shop I usually spend some time every week. The shop clerk, a dear friend, let me spend some time with that piano and evaluate it so he can see whether it's the case to order more samples or not from the Roland dealer.

Here's a list of what I spotted out so far:
- the V-piano is huge and heavy, not very likely to be used in gigs and tours, but in concert halls and studios. Other specifications make it more suited to studios too. The finishing is superb, but the polished surface gets dirty in a second and is hard to get it clean again...
- The price. +5000€ is a lot. Only a studio or a concert hall can buy it. (Pro musician would buy a Korg Oasys for 7000€ but that keyboard has everything you can imagine inside, included string instruments with physical modeling...) But then a concert hall would invest more probably, and a studio would get something which includes also other sounds as electric pianos or GM sounds...
- Yes: there are GM sounds but you can't play them! They are only available when playing a MIDI file by external sequencer! This is crazy, they spent some maybe hundreds MBs which cannot be accessed by the piano!
- not sure whether the interface is really neat. E.g. reaching the start/stop button for sequencer takes several menus to be opened
- The presets are really few, I could expect that from a sampled piano (like the Native Instrume Akoustik which requires lots of GBs for 4 pianos, but than you have precious quality samples)
- No fine tuning has been made: I mean, it is PERFECTLY tuned, but we don't like a real piano to be perfectly in tune, right? They didn't call an expert for this so far. That's bad. You can do the tuning yourself but probably most of us are not quite good in that. In fact we called another friend, a pianos tuner,
and after that the piano sounded times better. Normally a tuner would cost you some extra money.
- Sound editing parameters are really few for a physical modeling algorithm... The software editor is really good looking but has no additional features
- Some sounds are SAMPLED!!! Well, that's ok for the damper pedal noise or so, but... the duplex scale strings are sampled, and the hammer sound too! At least in some part of the keyboard. The version I could try has a very nasty bug: the hammer sound in a section of the higher keyboard was tracking, as it was sampled (surely it is). For tracking I mean this: let's hear the sound of it, e.g. for a C4 note, than playing a C#4 you will hear that the hammer sound is pitched up by a semitone! And this goes on for a few keys. That's bad.

Again, many of these bugs or problems, hopefully will be addressed by future firmware updates. Looks like Roland this time had a very short time to market and couldn't complete all the debugging. No shame however! Usually Japanese companies are very tight to schedule, everyone can slip for once, no problem. Anyways, I would here stress the fact that some sounds are sampled, ok minor things, the piano sounds are physical and really good, but as usual the advertisiment is a bit incorrect...
About the sound: Roland didn't claim it was physical modeling so, I might have used the term in a improper way. I'm not still sure why didn't they use the term.
Anyway: the physical reproduction of the piano is evident and gives its advantages, as in ribattutos and the likes. Very good. I've heard some people telling the sound is too boring or something like that, but since you can change it everyone will find a pleasant sound, and if Roland will bring up new presets this will get better.

I would point out an additional fact: a friend of mine, which played it even longer than me, says the keyboard it's a bit too hard. He has a Steinway and a Fazioli at home and he's piano teacher in an important music academy, so I trust his opinion...

I really think this will open a new season, and the next Vpianos to come will give better results, hopefully with lighter prices.

Other's opinions are welcome!

When I first heard and read about the V, I was sure I would buy one. A couple of months ago I realized that wasn't a good idea for practical $ reasons. When I finally got to try one a week ago, I was comfortable with the notion that I wouldn't be buying one.

I did not have the right situation for extended play that was afforded you, but I don't think I would have picked up all the subtle points that you did even if I played it for three days. I did have my own headphones along though, so I was able to evaluate it against the digitals I'm accustomed to play, and on that basis it came up short of what I was expecting. All the hype had led me to believe I would have a Bosendorfer, a Fazioli, a Steinway or anything else I wanted on demand. No doubt that came from wishful thinking more than anything else.

On the sampling/modeling issue, I don't much care. I don't think my FP7 is a product of pure sampling. I don't think the latest GX is either. I think Roland has been mixing sampling and modeling for a while now even though their sound has been categorized by others as sampled.

On the keyboard touch thing. all the high-end Roland actions are a little rough on hands that are unaccustomed to them. I'm about 60 / 40 digital to acoustic. I think it's just a matter of adaptation and not a real concern.

On the market to be served, I agree with you. Roland has to find a market. The combination of size, weight, price, and what's missing (speakers, ease of changing on the fly,...), indicate this piano has to find its own niche.

Like you, I admire the initiative in this one and in a lot of other Roland products as well. I look forward to the trickle-down effect.

Somehow all these physmod pianos always sound like the same instrument on a certain level, no matter how much you change the settings. This seems to be as true for the V-Piano as it is for Pianoteq. There's a certain quality of the sound that remains constant, despite superficial changes like detuning, hammer hardness, or soundboard impedance. It's still recognizable...

I tried one of those V-Pianos at guitar center today, and I really liked it. To me, it put all the other keyboards in the room to shame.
In my view, anyone with money who's looking for a piano / keyboard just for the sound of the piano should look no further.

Martin, I think what makes it "recognizable" is the quality of amp / speaker you use.
Ultimately, if a CD is well recorded, a good setup and -eyes closed- you would not know if you are home, or in a concert hall. Same for keyboards.

I had a good 20 minutes trying this thing out ...

Yes, if you would hear it on its own or in a mix, with a bit of EQ and reverb thrown in, etc., you probably couldn't tell it's the V-Piano.

But when I watched the unboxing/demo video at Keyboard magazine, they fiddled around with the controls, and superficially there were big changes, but a certain quality (or lack of quality) of the sound was always there. A slightly unpleasant kind of artificialness, perhaps. And that's also what I found with Pianoteq: No matter how much you tweak the settings, it always only sounds almost right.

I'll definitely give the V-Piano a try if the local Guitar Center has it. Demos and videos can be totally misleading of course, so maybe it's wonderful if it's right in front of you. And at any rate the V-Piano is unquestionably a big breakthrough in many ways and will sell very well I think.

Martin,

If you're not finding the sound you want in Pianoteq, please do go to the PianoTeq forum and talk about what you hear and what you want to hear. The developers want feedback and take impressions very seriously. It's not as though you drop a rock into a big corporation's well and never hear the echo. (I'm not part of the company.)

You can post recordings of notes or songs and talk about what's missing or too present. Or post a recording of a sound you like vrs a recording of the PianoTeq sound, and talk about the differences. The more people who contribute, the better.

http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/viewforum.php?id=1

i've played this thing 2 days in a row at different shops- about 45 minutes each session. I know this is their first pass at this. but i think- if you are really into playing- you have experienced nothing like this in a digital keyboard. i went with the intent of really listening for resonance, overtones, blah,blah. but each time - the first mainly though headphones, the second through external speakers- i wound up just playing my brains out. it is an inspiration to play. i have never felt action and responsiveness like that in a digital keyboard. no latency whatsover, complete dynamic response to your touch, lightening fast action, great touch sensation with the fake ivory material. the pianos all sound good. they don't need a lot of tweaking. the silver one is outstanding for rock, pop, gospel. the vintage one and two for anything you want to play- the vintage two has that mellow, jazz feel to it- wonderful for diminished chords. as i mentioned on another blog, the $6K is pretty steep- but to me that is early adopter pricing -as you see in all hi-tech stuff- iPhone, etc. i know this is NOT a mass market toy so who knows how long it takes to get the price down to the more reasonable $3000-4000 range. but it plays outstanding. i'm thinking about dragging my DAW over to GC here and seeing if they will let me record. to me, that will tell me if it does what needs to be done- how will it sound when dithered down to a 16bit CD..... all i know is when i play the sample programs i spend half my time tweaking this and that, but on this thing- i just wanted to play. and it made my playing better.....

knotty, see my reply above (below, whereever..) i am with you brother, this thing blew everything esle out the window. i have a yamaha p-250 which i have always appreciated as a terrific board. but it doesn't play ANYTHING like the v....

I went to a large music store close by to try out a bunch of keyboards, including the Casio PX 320, the Yamaha YPG-635, the 140, 155, 160, Nocturne, the Roland FP-4 and FP-7, the HP 207, and one of the YDPs. Anyway, I decided that I would get the least expensive that felt right and had a few features, I'm going to post my reaction to the keyboards somewhere else. We went to lunch and came back and I played a few keyboards some more. Then I asked to try the Roland V-piano which had just come in.

Well...there was no comparison. The touch was wonderful, altho' they have some kind of papery finish, I suppose to emulate aged ivory keys, they were unlike anything I've played on an acoustic or digital, but I liked it...they just looked a bit artificial.

The sound was gorgeous, nothing else came close. And earlier this week I played a bunch of Yamahas at the Yamaha dealer.

The way the keyboard responded to my changes in touch was like a really good acoustic, actually better than any of the pianos I've played including the Steinway grand in our classroom, altho' I've never played a Steinway concert grand.

I would have played all day if I could. I loved it.

The gradual decay of sound was just like an acoustic. I really don't have a clue how any of this works, but I don't care. I want one. I didn't play around with the different voicings or strings or models...I just played the "Steinway" sound.

I think that the price point is very good for what you get. Admittedly, you're not going to get a stage piano to use for accompaniment. This is just the closest sound to a grand that you can get without having a grand.

I think that this piano won't appeal to those who want a lot of Synth/track/sequ/stage stuff. That's not what this piano's about. It's for the sound/touch purist who wants the experience of a superb quality grand at $5,000 and who wants to be able to voice the imaginary strings in who knows what ways. My dream would be to voice it to make it sound one way for baroque music, another for romantic, another for classical or contemporary. So that would be the classical pianist. On the other hand, it would be great for a jazz pianist as well, and I suppose there are many ways to voice it for other styles, but I THINK, (altho' I don't know for sure since I didn't care about the other stuff with this lovely beast) that it is really intended just to be a piano, and not drums/strings/choirs/etc....How great is that?

Hi Jake!



Well, I think it's hard to describe. Recently I experimented a bit with Python and sound synthesis: sum a few harmonics, use an envelope, etc., just to explore the basics of synthesis (http://home.arcor.de/mdoege/pysynth/).

Of course my project is just for fun and not meant to be compared to Pianoteq, but I still find similar aural characteristics both in the output of my synthesizer script and Pianoteq: Somewhat bell-like, not bright but muffled (in my case because Python is too slow to sum dozens of harmonics, in Pianoteq's case presumably it's related to how many segments per string are simulated), a little too metallic, piercing, clangy, cold, lacking wood in other words. Plus in Pianoteq's case the hammer noise in the top two octaves or so is very strange (sounds more as if someone is knocking against the wall).

But I don't know if Pianoteq and physical modeling in general can be "fixed" that easily. The developers probably need to do a better job simulating the sonic characteristics of wood -- and I don't just mean the soundboard, but the entire enclosure -- to give it a warmer sound, and the program perhaps needs to simulate more segments per string to make it brighter and more "immediate" in its sound, right now it's more as if the sound is coming from the next room. Moore's Law will probably eventually solve all those problems, or maybe the algorithms need to get better. I don't know if much can be learned from the V-Piano, as it seems to employ a hybrid technique (sampling and modeling).

That is not to say that TruePianos is perfect, but I find it (at least most of the time) to be comparatively pleasant in its synthy-ness, while Pianoteq and to a lesser extent the V-Piano sound somewhat unpleasantly synthy to me. My main criterion is not so much realism, but mainly if I consider the overall sound to be beautiful or not.

Isn't that material also supposed to absorb moisture from the fingers like ebony/ivory does? I read that about one of these high-end DP's featuring that, I just don't know if it was the V-Piano or the AvantGrand...

There is no sampling used in the V-Piano. It is modeling only.

Lawrence

Nikalette, i believe when i was tooling around with it they had a pianoforte voice setting that would be very useful for baroque, etc. go to youtube and watch the demo videos. scott tibbs did some demo work at NAMM and his playing is just awesome. the thing is versatile beyond belief. there ARE some real issues- if you wanted it for performance you would have to hire a crew to carry it around. i wonder if it has been fully de-bugged at this stage so you will probably be having to update software periodically. and you will experience the pain of seeing it offered cheaper in a year...maybe. but your reaction seemed to be like mine- i played "inspired" on it. i have a 5-11 Steinway at home, and i thought the roland was much more fun to actually play. no, it will never have the natural sound of it, but i played better on it than i do the steinway. it is not for the workstation crowd that want a board for production, but in my mind those boards have rotten sounding pianos. so you have to make a choice

It's like nothing else. I can't wrap my brain around it. But what another poster said about any DP missing something, no matter how good, I don't think so. Because 99% of the acoustics I've played are missing something. I don't have the opportunity to play a top notch American or European grand, maybe they're not missing something.

I love this instrument so much, I've thrown all my other plans out the window. I know if and when I get it, I'll play way more than I would play any other DP, or either of the acoustics I've had.

Oh and vis-a-vis Piano tech and all the computer generated stuff. The V piano is one unit and whatever happens is in response to my fingers touching the keys. That makes it as organic as it is possible for a DP to get. To me, running a software program on a computer then through a keyboard, well, that's a whole bunch of extra steps between my fingers touching the keys and the sound emerging...maybe it didn't matter when you were playing a sampled keyboard, which I guess is just playing a bunch of recordings when you push down a key, but with this V thing, you really are playing an instrument, even though the mechanics are generated in a way I don't understand. To my electronically uneducated brain it just feels like someone has put the real workings of a grand piano inside of the cabinet, every last component....it's just put together in a different way, but the sound comes out in the same way.

I think so, it just looked so different, kind of a transluscent white wash. Oh, I am SO in love! When I sat down and played the opening bars of a Chopin Waltz and a prelude, I melted. I told the salesman, "It's like buttah." Maybe I'm easy, but I just had a real emotional response to the sound, feel and response of that sexy little thing. I had spent about an hour playing those 2 pieces on a dozen keyboards, and finally I got a response. I know I'm waxing a bit erotic here, but it's kind of like what I imagine would be the difference between sharing a Coke with Ryan Seacrest or champagne with Johnny Depp.

It only weighs 84 lbs. That's not so bad. I tried to watch the Scott Tibbs thing from NAMM but some idiot was banging away on drums in the background and I go nuts with that sort of stuff. I noticed that on the owner's manual they refer to one of the USB ports as being for patches and upgrades, so no doubt they will come. I'm jealous - you have a Steinway!

Martin:

Have you tried the latest demo version of PianoTeq, version 3.2, I think it is. Version 3 is night and day different from the previous versions.

In any case, the comments that you made earlier in this thread would be taken seriously in the PianoTeq forum, and would be taken into consideration in the next update.

In the first post of this thread it says:



I think it would make sense to use samples for something like damper noise, which would be very hard to model I think.