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Kawai James - If you build it they will come!

Glenn NK - because it feels more like a "piano" that way!

How many more years, decades, or centuries will digital instruments keep trying to emulate a centuries old mechanism versus creating new possibilities to the musician?

Today there remains --just as with the traditional typewriter layout on modern computers -- a chicken and egg problem with the conventional technique acquisition methods of students and related marketing need for calling the instruments digital "pianos", yet it would seem to me that if there was a time to start breaking away from the past, that this time is arriving.

Certainly Yamaha and Kawai would find such a developmental direction more threatening than Roland, Korg or others.

Most of pianist learn on an acoustic, and I think it's good for music; it isn't good idea to change it (I know nobody proposed it). So as long as it happens, pianist know the beauty of real string and real resonance, even if such a instrument have disadvantages. This explains the desire, and supply in effect. So still, huge part of "digital keyboarders" will expect to find instrument which emulates beauty of an acoustic as much as possible.

If piano tones sound electrical, first thing I think: it isn't good instrument, because they can't make better. But if it would be an instrument which provides realistic grand piano sound (but never ideal - we know it), and you can adjust it to go even further and create your own sound, it really make sense. I hope V-piano provides it. But - may I notice - it still want to emulate acoustic instruments, not to be digital: GRAND with another strings, GRAND with different soundboard, GRAND with different strings, and so on.

theJourney - I don't think there's a chicken-and-egg problem at all. There already exist all manner of keyboard-based instruments that continue to provide new and interesting ways to interact with sound and, ultimately, music. I don't expect that development to ever stop. Humankind's inventiveness and curiosity will make sure of that.

The piano, on the other hand, antiquated though it may be, is a pleasing and useful musical instrument. Unfortunately it's also heavy, expensive, environmentally sensitive, and requires constant maintenance. Hence the development of digital pianos which are portable, inexpensive, reliable, and durable.

My point being that if you want a next-generation keyboard-driven musical instrument there are many available and more will come. If, however, you want a piano that you can afford, lift, and maintain yourself you buy a digital piano that attempts to emulate as closely as possible the experience of playing that 19th-century beast we all know and love!

The second you get away from hammers and strings, and digital representations of such, it ceases to be a piano.

Let's assume we get a really daring piano maker that makes the soundboard, plate and entire action out of carbon fiber. String it with piano strings, and I bet it'll be clearer, more powerful then a wood piano -- but it'd still sound much like a piano. You cant' get away from the nature of the beast, and that's why digitals emulate the physical. we *wanted* them to. There were other attempts -- early synths, Rhodes tine pianos, Wulitzer electrics.. honestly.. they didn't sound a bit like a real pianos.

Digitals sound close to real pianos.

To see a vivid illustration of what I mean, hit Luis and Clark\'s website . They make carbon fiber violins, viols, basses, cellos, etc. And I don't mean wood covered with a thin veneer of carbonfiber, I mean the entire instrument sans pegs and bridge is made of carbon. The tone is dry and powerful, yet you can still tell it's a stringed instrument descended from almost 1000 years of stringed instruments.

You can't get away from the nature of the beast.

But I maintain -- the second you drop the strings and hammers, or digital representations of them, it's not a piano anymore. It's something else.

This made me think... why don't I see carbon soundboards? Actions? (entire actions, not just little bits of it..) Why don't I see carbon-fiber bourdons in organs? Can you imagine an entire windchest, pallet and action built out of carbon instead of hand-carved wood?

I can imagine a piano that's 100% carbon except for the strings.

But then, some would still complain that it's too old-school because it still has hammers and strings.

I don't want to see the piano go away. Ever. Same with the organ.

By all means, innovate -- build new instruments.

But again.. if that new instruments still has hammers and strings.. it's a piano. And if a digital system emulates that phsysical instrument, well, it's still a digital piano.

What is sacred about the piano? - it's a relatively new instrument, and it was conceived to replace the clavichord.

And compared to most other acoustic musical instruments, it's very expensive, very heavy, and requires a tremendous amount of care and upkeep.

And it's still evolving - a modern grand really isn't much like Cristofori's pianoforte. I was discussing the changes made in pianos over the years with my piano-rebuilder friend, and he thought that carbon fibre would make much better keys and hammers. By using carbon fibre, the rotational mass of the key and hammer system can be made lighter which would improve the repetition rate possible on a piano. CF is dimensionally stable when subjected to humidity changes - wood is not. As a structural engineer, I do some considerable design with wood - it's a constant problem in terms of stability.

I truly love the piano (and have for more than 62 years), but I recognize its limitations. It's going to evolve some more.

Apparently someone also recognized the limitations of the acoustic guitar - other than six strings and a bridge and tuning pegs, the electric guitar used by rock musicians doesn't sound or look much like an acoustic guitar.

Glenn - nothing is sacred about the piano! I love the idea of a piano re-designed from the ground up to take advantage of 21st century advances in materials and production. However all of the instruments that are still called pianos and their variants (Rhodes, Wurly, CP70 etc), stick with the " press the keys, fast attack and a full sounding sustain" paradigm.

I think the question is how much can one change the instrument and still call it a piano? Could you still call it a piano if you pulled on the keys, the attack was slow and the sustain portion sounded like a horn?

^ That's called an organ ;o)

To me the sacred bits of the piano are:

1. Hammers
2. Strings
3. Soundboard

Do the hammers and strings and soundboard need to be physical? Not in my book. But they need to be present, even if in virtual form. Which is exactly what a digital piano is. Doubly so with those who are 100% model-based.

The materials and execution of such sacred bits is not sacred. I really honestly want to see a carbon fiber soundboard, hammer heads, hammer shanks, well, the whole action really, including keys. Why not? Because a bunch of fuddy duddies will declare it a nonpiano? Bull. Build it, people will try it, and if it's good, people will buy it.

Interesting... http://www.rainsong.com/deal/

^ Yea. like that. That's two acoustic instrument families in carbon. The Luis and Clark fiddles, and now these guitars.

I want one!

It's interesting that two out of three essentials of a piano are the same as a guitar and the violin family (and other stringed instruments).

Guitars would be the closest because the strings are struck or plucked - often with a hard object such as a fingernail or a pick.

When I was much younger, I played the ukelele, and my favourite pick was felt (why does this material seem familiar? ).

What has often struck me is that more than a few digital pianos have a sound that resembles a guitar. Of course if we think about the physics of the two acoustic instruments and how the sound is produced by the physics, the similarity is less surprising.

As you say, "build it, people will try it, and if it's good, people will buy it".

This will be the test, not whether it meets the criteria of any expert. This must not be construed as a put down on anyone, it's just a statement of reality.

As with any instrument that produces pleasant musical sounds, the real test is that the sounds are pleasing; not what the instrument looks like or how it produces these sounds.

I think Roland (and Pianoteq) are on to something, and the rest had better try to catch up.

Glenn

I've tried the Pianoteq demo version for the past several days. It is very nice to play - responds smoothly, but, it is not accurate in terms of what a piano should sound like. So, it's off of my list at least until the next major version is released.

I'm hopeful for the V-Piano, but of course it's not yet available to try out. You can't really judge based on compressed audio from online video, and I frankly have to laugh at comparisons between the V-Piano and Pianoteq. How can you compare? You can't until the V-Piano is actually available for us less fortunate to try out!

However, I personally know someone who was privy to the private demonstrates of the V-Piano at NAMM, and I have great faith and respect for this individual's opinion.

His observation? It is absolutely mind-blowing what this piano does and how pure a sound it can produce. What's great about V-piano is that you can make sound EXACTLY the way you want, on a note-by-note, hammer-by-hammer, string-by-string basis.

So, it will be interesting to get to try out the V-Piano (and also the Pianoteq update when it arrives). In the meantime, I'm saving my money pile.

Lawrence

Interestingly enough there is an ad to the right of this forum for Wessell, Nickel and Gross composite action parts.

I am not familiar with them but it seems to fit in this discussion.

Most of the shops here in the UK are now advertising V-Piano for £4,999.00 GB pounds. Ouch!
It has ETA of April 2009.
There is another 10 minute video to watch about it here .

So how realistic DOES it sound?

Does anyone have a list of exactly what parameters the user can edit?
I'd like to know if you can adjust the string's overall sustain duration and peak attack to average level ratio for a struck string.
I like the fact that you can make your adjustments over a specific keyboard range only, unlike Pianoteq where everything is global and you keep fighting it because tweaking the bass messes up the treble, etc. Roland have got it right in this respect.

Does anyone know what digital audio rates it supports? It obviously has coaxial S/PDIF output, which we would expect to be a full 24 bit wordlength true stereo signal, but I wonder if it can generate 96kHz or 192kHz output from the theoretical maths processing going on?

What is the virtual listener's position with respect to the audio generated?
I assume they've at least included player perspective plus a distant / ambient audience perspective, as seems fashionable these days. It does have some built in reverb / ambience effects, which are likely to be convolution based. It would be nice however (if the ambient soundstaging were also the result of pure mathematical modelling rather than a sampled convolution reverb (which would defeat the object by colouring the whole audio with the convolved audio recording of the sampled reverb impulse anyway!)) if the listener perspective was user adjustable in a virtual 3D environment whereby you could move your "ears" up / down, closer / further away and all around the virtual modelled instrument using your choice of (X,Y,Z) axis Cartesian co-ordinates in millimetres.
But I doubt that the V-Piano model maths includes such spatial radiation patterns from the instrument into a virtual environment like this.
That would be ideal for totally customisable stereo soundstages, and even 5.1 or 7.1 surround perspectives, although the V-Piano doesn't have any 5.1 outputs of course so obviously the technology isn't there yet.

So far, I haven't heard very much mention about the piano's spurious mechanical noises, as Roland's theoretical model seems to begin with a felt hammer striking a string? I'm sure they have included pedal squeaks, key movement knocks and scrapes and so on, but I don't remember seeing it.
To me when I close me eyes and listen to V-Piano demos the bass and middle of the keyboard sound great (extremely convincing) but just at the top octave or two of the keyboard I can somehow tell it's a digital instrument and not quite real.
Obviously, this could just be the low quality internet video's compressed audio track messing up the sound, but I that should probably degrade everything similarly, not just the high notes only, so maybe I am hearing something of the V-Piano's sonic character, but I'd certainly need to play the actual instrument to make any serious judgment.

Joke - if they're really gonna make a realistic digital piano, it should gradually go out of tune and "age" to a duller tone if you play it continuously for years.

Musician's Friend..5,999.99 ETA June/09..

High-resolution audio demos for V-Piano

http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2009/02/02/wnamm09-v-piano-soundfiles-uploaded/

Quoting Sonic State:

“Since we put the exclusive demo of the V-Piano on line from NAMM where we were ushered into a private room to see the new keyboard, we've had several requests to post higher resolution audio files of the session. Thanks to the marvel of modern technology, we did record them to a separate stereo recorder and have indeed now posted them at 44.1/16-bit for you.

Once again, thanks to John Maul for the great demo and Sean and Amanda from Roland for making this possible.”

propianist, provided you didn't mind AC3 compressed audio, the S/PDIF on the V-Piano connect theoretically output surround sound.

Cheers,
James
x

Interesting what you say. You say a lot...
Nobody talked about the timing of this "machine".
For me it sounds on the demo like the same as many other older digital pianos: Playing more than 5 Notes at the same time will not make sound those notes in the same time, you'll have always a "prrrrrrp" as chord instead of a clear "one shot" like on a real piano.
The fact, that in all those comments NOBODY talked about this, makes me belive, that nobody is fully aware of this difference.
As long as we have this serial timing- desease MIDI, we'll have this problem.
I've read about newer technologies than MIDI that can do a lot of things more now, but they are obviously also not good for reducing the serial "prrrrrrr"- problem...

angelvoice, may I please ask you to point out in which of the video clips (and at what point) the arpeggio effect that you describe is most noticeable?

I strongly doubt that Roland would ever release a product with such an obvious limitation.

Furthermore, while you are correct about the technical barriers imposed by the dated MIDI standard, I also doubt that the V-Piano utilises MIDI for internally generated sounds, so this should not be an issue.

Remember, Roland have been in the musical instrument industry for many many years - I fully trust their engineers to deliver an excellent product.

Kind regards,
James
x

I've briefly tried the V-Piano.

I liked it lot more than I thought I would. For example, the single notes in the "Dewster test" sounded very drab to me. When playing it for real, I didn't notice as much of this drabness.

Other points:
- It has the metallic quality that I like a lot. It really sounds like STEEL strings vibrating.

- I like the richness of the slow phasing, as the notes evolve, presumably due to slight unison detuning. It has a sort of "vocal" quality to it - like it's trying to speak to you. It also often has a kind of mournful, wailing sound, which I find quite infectious.

Greg.