HCMarkus wrote:However, when we play Ivory or any sample-based VI, we are playing recordings of individual notes. When we play a real piano, we are playing a unified instrument, which is then recorded as a whole. The interaction between resonating strings is ever-changing, depending on factors and relationships that no VI has yet to satisfactorily reproduce. No sample-based VI, to my knowledge, will allow one to set non-played strings in motion by exciting harmonically-related notes. This happens as a matter of course with a real piano.
You hit the nail on the head with that one.
Shooshie wrote:Frodo wrote:The Blüthner Model One takes this concept a step further...
That much "sustain" in the upper register is going to get really noisy. You don't hear that in a piano from 10 feet away. That's "head-in-the-piano" stuff. I love putting my head in a piano and listening to the harmonics and dissonances roll through the strings, but when you close mic a piano you have to balance that kind of thing with what you'd really expect to hear in the audience at a piano concert -- even if you were sitting 10 feet from the piano. What I heard in that recording isn't it. It's over the top. They might use it as a sales feature, but I think a recording would be a bit noisy with it. On the other hand, I've always liked a little more of that in my recordings -- especially the stuff in the mids and low registers -- than most people. But that was too much in my opinion. What do you think?
I actually really like that "head-in-the-piano" kind of sound. When I record on my parent's piano, that is the kind of sound I get and relish. It is like you are sitting right at the piano with an open lid, and the string vibrations
themselves get to become performers right alongside the pianist.
I guess this is really a matter of taste and genre. I like a close piano sound, and even with classical music, if given the choice, I would probably prefer a closed mic recording than something recorded from more than 10 feet away.
And this leads to another point... if you are going to recreate the sound of a piano in a concert hall, then using Altiverb to put a VI piano in that space is definitely going to help hide any inherent flaws in the realism of the VI piano. Getting it to sound authentic when up close and personal is much more difficult, in my opinion. Just a couple of days ago, a friend was playing me a piece over the phone, and with the sound of his room in the background the piece sounded unbelievably spectacular! But then he sent me the file, and I played it directly through my studio monitors, and I thought the piano sounded disappointingly phoney.
I have yet to find a VI piano that really, really does it for me. I am interested in the new Garriton Steinway and the Blüthner. We'll see how the year unfolds.
P.S. I don't actually have Ivory or Akoustik Piano, though I have heard recordings of them. With Shooshie's discovery of further resonance options in Akoustic Piano, I think I should probably pay a visit to a friend (who I think has both) and play around with them a little a more.
But I can say positively, without a doubt, truly, factually, and totally accurately that I'm happy with Ivory and Akoustik Piano. Between the two of them, I feel as though I can accomplish pretty much anything pianistically that I might encounter. Including a head-in-the-piano recording. 
