Just wanted to share this with you as I've never got PTQ sounding so warm and woody before. It's using the Close Mic HSClairedelune fxp that was posted on the PTQ forums a week or two ago, in Garageband with the free TAL reverb plugin.

I'm afraid my mp3 compressing have spoiled the sound a bit the original is more open and airy.

Gymnopedie

Love to hear what others think!

It's not me playing incidentally, just a midi file I downloaded

Sounds great, I will try it out later.
I'm learning that piece as well

Gosh, and they say the V-Piano sounds processed and synthetic! It's amazing how a piano obviously means different things to different people...No offence intended because I know Pianoteq has many devoted fans out there but this is just awful to my ears...doesn't sound real at all to me.

Anyway, it would be a boring existence if we all went for the same thing!

Steve

Can you post a link to the FXP / Thread so we can read it too please

Can you post a link to the FXP / Thread so we can read it too please

I like it BazC. It's much better than a lot of other recordings I have heard. Great job on the piece too.

Only the mids!



If you spend any time at the Pianoteq forum, you'll quickly realize just how devoted. Seems like a form of religion to some . . . Not me, though. I want my AP to sound like AP. (Go figure!)

Sounds like a well-miced "classical" perspective setting.

This is the nice tiing about MIDI recording. If you like the playing but not Pianoteq then you can re-render the same performance in Gallaxy's "Italian Grand" and then if that is to dark try a Yamaha C3 sample.

Once you have a bunch of these virtual instrument installed in (say) Logic. Then you can just click a mouse button to change and then replay in Ivory and switch until you get the sound you like. It's not that expensive to have two or three sample sets installed.

I think they all have their place. I'd prefer this recording more it were on the 10 foot Italian. Pianoteq might be better for a brighter, faster piece or pop music.

Isn't it great to live in the 21st century where we can change the sound the piano AFTER the recording is made with just one mouse click?

Sorry, sounds like plain crap... No offense, just that it doesn't sound like a piano at all, maybe something else. It's not my taste at all.

Do you have something to post that sounds like a piano? I've been listening/playing a DP for so long, I think I forget what the real things sounds like.

Glenn

If I understand properly, this would be the Kawaian ideal for a piano sound to compete with Pianoteq:

http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1390205.html#Post1390205

Well theJourney, it's not ideal at all, but in my view (and I often play acoustics) it's much more realistic regarding the base sound signature and therefore going into the right direction. I know that pianoteq simulates many acoustic characteristics (resonance etc.) quite well, but for me it is only worth it if the base sound really has this specific tone.

I'm really sorry about that, because I really WANT pianoteq to sound right, but it's absolutely non-inspiring to me because I don't recognize it as a piano.

I'm sure I don't have as discerning ears as many on the forum but I'm surprised you think it sounds awful! It may not sound exactly like an acoustic but I love the sound and I'm having a ball playing it. Each to his own I guess!

I'd like to make it clear that I did not play that piece (wish I did!) I'm very much a beginner!

The thread where the fxp was posted is here;

Pianoteq Forum

Well it's quite interesting why there are so many people who like the sound of pianoteq so much... I actually have no idea! Am I blind to the beauty of the sound (like green/yellow blind people?). I don't know. It's just that I didn't find a single sound on my pianoteq demo that I really like or even think of being decent for playing joy. No way. The V-Piano is better, but still there's a lot to desire. I guess I have played too many acoustic pianos to love a somehow still artificial sound so much. On the other side, I love electronic music very much, but this is obvious no real instruments, maybe that's the difference, I don't know.

There seems to be two camps. Some think a digital piano must exactly emulate an acoustic piano or it's rubbish. Others are beginning to accept the DP as a real instrument that need not sound exactly like any acoustic piano. It will maybe take another generation and better DP technology for this transition to complete.

Well there might be these two camps, but still the pianoteq does not sound pleasing to my ears despite the fact that I love music with electronic instruments that have no acoustic complement.

Sounds real good! Very woody and robust. Maybe a tad too much reverb for my taste.
Thanks for sharing!

I can only repeat what kawaian said. In fact, to my ears it sounded so disgusting, that I stopped it at the middle... I understand it could be fun for some people to think it must be good because it is modeled. Not for me.

I don't understand "disgusting." Seriously, could you comment on what you dislike? Is it electronic, to you? Too smooth, in an sense? Too stretched?

Not trying to persuade you. Could you just list some words that describe the sound, using musical\sound terminology?

The chords sounded "muddied" to my ears, a bit of a "mish-mash". I liked the individual notes though.

For sure some interesting discussion since I posted, although descriptors like "mish-mash" and "disgusting" don't seem to enlighten me at the moment. It sounded like a piano to me, but perhaps a rendition of the same midi file with another sound could help.

Glenn

Try making two or three files and asking people which they prefer. Don't say which is which. Use about 320K MP3 files so most of the compression artifacts go away.

A point I'd like to make is Pianoteq can sound incredibly different depending on the audio set up. On my Sennheiser headphones, Ivory and True Pianos trounce Pianoteq. On my 8 inch monitors and subwoofer, Pianoteq wins hands down. So we truely may not be having a similar sound experience when we critique an fxp.

Pianoteq seems to polarise opinion more than just about anything. Very few people say "it's alright" or "I don't mind it"...people either really like it or, like me, really hate it. I too couldn't listen to the end. There is just a total absence of realness. I've listened to loads of demos and just cannot hear an acoustic piano. I am not obsessive about realism usually. Like Chris I accept that a DP is an instrument in its own right. My Roland RD-1000 sounds nothing like a real piano, it is a mathematical algorithm...from 1986...so much for Pianoteq and the V-Piano (which I've also owned) being groundbreaking. But the RD-1000 has real guts and presence and a personality...very expressive despite its lack of sonic fidelity to an AP.

Pianoteq makes me shiver, it sounds so cold and soulless with this metallic synthetic ringing...the upper mids are truly disgusting to my ears, almost alien in their timbre. For people to say "it's woody" makes me laugh...I've never heard a piano emulation so lacking in that quality.

But really it is just very interesting how different people hear it...fascinating in fact.

Steve

Actually many of the debates on this forum (and the piano forum for that matter where possible) would be greatly helped by having someone provide double blind mp3s of the same midi file rendered by the different digital piano brand/model/voices. I suspect there might be some surprises coming out of this similar to the Bottle Shock surprises of California wines trumping French ones.

In my case, what I really like about pianoteq is the ability to control the expressiveness of the sound: my old Korg board has sudden new life breathed into it allowing differentiated articulation, broad dynamic response, etc. Does the sound equal an acoustic piano? No, but the same can be said for the digital pianos as well. The tone when sounding single notes on a CLP-380 might sound better to a Yamaha fan, but that doesn't mean you can make the CLP-380 do what you want to do, nor does it mean that its sound is alive sounding or responsive or pleasant to have to listen to for 2 hours of practice a day.

Post the midi and I will render it using a variety of VSTs

Well, I was thinking in particular of having it rendered by say a Yamaha CP-1, Yamaha CLP-380, a Roland VPiano, a Roland HP-307, a Kawai CA93, etc. next to software sample sets and pianoteq.

Pianoteq is like the CP-1 and VPiano interesting in that you can manipulate it in infinite ways. Many of the debates taking place on teh pianoteq forum are about tweaking more than playing. So, it is difficult to say what the ideal pianoteq settings should be, just as it is difficult to say if the VPiano silver or another piano is better. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

You cannot manipulate Pianoteq in infinite ways unfortunately, but you can make nearly infinitely subtle changes to the sound. Being "infinitely manipulable" would imply that with the right parameters a Steinway D sound could be reproduced, but the developers themselves said that is impossible.

A real life comparison using a real midi, not the synthetic BSOD test, would be nice.

You can download the midi here Satie Gymnopedie 1