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Not trying to pick on you, but I was - and hopefully still am - a coder (verilog). The only way I got as good as I am (however good that is) was by constantly rewriting, polishing, and reexamining my and other's code.


I think doing it half-assed in the first place is more time consuming and expensive in the long term, though it gives management something to manage, and thus a reason to exist.

Craftsmanship is the only thing that interests me and keeps me going. Really believing in something is the only reason to do anything.

Update on the Roland HP-307 and MIDI:

For those that have been watching, the HP-307 does not automatically enable piano effects during MIDI playback (the DPBSD test first revealed this).

So far I've been able to determine that the following settings can be enabled through MIDI:

• Reverb (ON / OFF)
• Damper Resonance (off, 1..10)
• Cabinet Resonance (off, 1..10)
• String Resonance (off, 1..10)

What this means is that a special DPBSD MIDI file, specific to HP-307, will be needed to enable the effects. But more investigation is needed to see what else is possible.

I've updated this webpage (it's not very pretty right now):

http://wmsar.info/dewster_dpbsd/

Hopefully Roland will release the MIDI spec soon.

Regards

Welcome to the modern world. This is why I left the industry.

jmmec, do keep us posted on your results - I for one am very interested in anything you come up with to solve this problem.

Despite all the fancy marketing, hardware DPs are woefully behind the technology curve - and some PC samplers aren't much better (though some are quite a bit better).

same thing here, but if the schedule says you have to be ready by day X and you know that doing things well would take until day X + 20 well, corners have to be cut unfortunately: as you well know most software developers would LOVE to always have the time to do it 'right' and complete and perfect the first time, but the moment you mix up the business side of things that starts becoming difficult (more or less difficult depending on how 'enlightened' the company you work for is, of course).



and there you go about the 'enlightened' side of things, some companies realize that effort spent upfront saves a lot of time/expense in the long term, but most companies prefer to 'ship early, ship often (and ship a lot of bugfixes)'. Hardware companies have a lot less of a choice to do this (recalling a chip because of a hw bug is not simple, or cheap) but software companies especially in this day and age have very little penalty to pay, and paradoxically having a certain level of patching/bugfixing will generate income for your customer support department



I am lucky that currently I am in a position where I have to make very few compromises in terms of craftmanship (as in, I get the time to do things 'right' 99% of the times) but having been in this field for a while now I do realize this is the exception rather than the rule.

Add to that damper noise, although it might be enabled once damper resonance gets enabled (without it damper noise can be set to 10 and still not provide any sound)


Tbh it's been so long since someone on this forum asked Roland to provide it that I doubt we will ever see it...

Don't let your boss know, otherwise he'll cut your development time immediately...

hahaha, you are so right

Did they ever release the midi spec for the HP207? Not according to JMMEC's site (great stuff BTW).

Roland HP-307 Update - MIDI Playback:

Okay everyone, the website is updated with the latest and greatest understanding of the HP-307 MIDI playback behavior. No promises that this is 100% correct, but I promise that I'm not making it all up:

http://wmsar.info/dewster_dpbsd/

The bottom line is that I'm able to enable all the effects that I played with (the main effects).

Sometime this weekend, I plan to run a new DPBSD test.

Regards

Really awesome work jmmec
As for duplex scale - you can hear it when you strike the low bass notes. There's a clear distinction between on and off. If I recall correctly you can play the demo (I mean the demo songs of piano designer under [Twin Piano]+[Functions], p.19 in the manual) that will demonstrate it for you.

Ah! I had forgotten about the 'demo' which is very useful.

I just played around with 'duplex scale' and I hear it very clearly now. doh....

I also need to modify my impression of "key off resonance" since it extends across the keyboard, and not just from Middle-C and lower.

Thanks

Listening to so many DPs rendering the DPBSD test gets me to thinking how might be the best way to make a realistic piano-like sound with a combination of samples and modeling. Here's what I would try:

1. Record a real piano with only one string per note allowed to vibrate (either damp the unison strings or remove them).
2. Interpolate in the frequency domain between 4 or more velocity layer attack samples per note (recorded in step 1).
3. For each note make multiple waveguides: one each for the transverse vibration of each unison string, and at least one more for the longitudinal vibrations.
4. To play a note, excite its waveguides with the corresponding recorded & interpolated attack sample.
5. Couple the waveguides together to create sympathetic resonance.

Voila! Small sample set, realistic inter-beating of unison strings, unlooped natural sounding decay, no velocity switching, all the sympathetic resonance you could ever want.

You forgot the soundboard in your model :), but recording the attack/response and playing it back sounds like commuted waveguide synthesis. There's a similar idea here, if you haven't already seen it:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/Piano.html
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/wav/pno-cs.wav

Yes, thanks for the pointer, saw that back in my grad school days. Julius O. Smith has some awesome web pages on taking the Karplus-Strong algorithm to new heights. His initial paper in CMJ on that is a must-read.

Since the soundboard response is part of the note sampling, it would naturally be included - or in the parlance, commuted.

A long time ago I was working on someone's electronic stage piano. It was analog and had one oscillator and one envelope generator per note, along with some filtering. The problem was some keys weren't responding, and it turned out that some connections to the tiny individual PCBs were slightly oxidized. Pulling them out and cleaning the contacts with an eraser fixed it. But while I was in there I played with it a bit, and discovered a pot on the oscillator board that adjusted the frequency (ugh). I detuned one note 1/2 step and played it along with the note next to it and the sound became much more piano-like. Amazing how little it takes to improve a simulation.

Roland HP-307 & MIDI Update:

Hey dewster,

There are 3 new MP3's at the website below, where two use a newly modified DPBSD v1.7b. At last, the recording levels should be okay, but please do confirm.

There was a new critical discovery about the HP-307 and MIDI playback. Pretty frustrating and a waste of 6+ hours.

You'll see that the 'pedal down sympathetic resonance' test should pass now, though it is much more obvious with "Damper Resonance = 10" instead of the default setting (5). But even at the default setting, the "sqiggly lines" clearly show a difference.

http://wmsar.info/dewster_dpbsd

The webpage above will be updated in the next day or two with new information and corrections, and also include the modified DPBSD for the HP-307.

regards

The noise floor is excellent, but the peak level could use another 5 dB or so.


Didn't you get the memo? Graphs of squggly lines are meaningless!

I'm hearing both pedal down and key down sympathetic resonance. No pedal down sound effects though.

heh... I also discovered the "soul" of the HP-307 and it is MIDI Channel 4. My fear is that some will argue that the person-hood of the HP-307 is being violated by revealing this truth (or is it a... bug?). One can never be too careful in avoiding the sensitivities of others, especially in these days and times.

There was clipping on the modified v1.7b Test #1, so I turned things down to stop that section from clipping. So just turn it back up and live with Test #1 clipping on future recordings?

I can improve the levels for the MP3 for the baseline DPBSD v1.7 since that didn't have clipping since 'sym resonance' is disabled (but this was recorded last, so it used the same, lower levels, as the other 2 MP3's).

This may be outside the scope of your intentions, but any other thoughts about the 'damper down' and 'key down' sympathetic resonance tests? Do you consider the sound good, decent, bad, indifferent, unexpected, revealing, mysterious, profound, awful, sickening? Do you need a better recording?

When it comes to applied science, any appeals to pure subjectivity can and should be disregarded.


Turn it up to the point where clipping is just about to happen, with maybe 1 dB headroom left over. When I open the full DPBSD MP3 with pedal down sympathetic resonance set to 5 (dpbsd_v1_7b_Roland_HP307_DR5_jmmec.mp3) Audition tells me the peak level is -5.53 dB. So you could turn that test up 5 dB more without clipping. The noise floor looks very good now, with only +/- 1 bit of noise, so the peak level is less important than it was in your previous recordings. There is some kind of mosquito noise going on down there though that is kind of odd, could be MP3 artifacts I suppose.


IMO, key-down symp res is so subtle that it's way down on my list of things I need in a piano sound. Though I do appreciate it when it is implemented in some form. To me it's much more exciting that looping, stretching, and layer switching are absent on the HP307, and that it passes the pedal down silent replay test, the quick pedal partial damping test, and the partial pedaling test with flying colors.

Pedal down symp res is much more important to me as it is not subtle at all on a real piano, and indeed for me is the most beautiful part of a real piano sound. Since it is often implemented as a delay or dispersion effect, it can often interact poorly with looping, which seems to be the case in many Yamaha DPs.

I don't hear that kind of interaction in your HP307 MP3s, which is good, but it does sound rather like a reverb effect. How does it strike you?

And how does it strike others who have listened to the MP3 files, particularly dpbsd_v1_7b_Roland_HP307_DR10_PARTIAL_jmmec.mp3 where it is turned up to 10?