MOTUnation.com

Thanks guys for the clarification and the info. I located the page for the D, too, and just flipping back and forth between them you can almost uniformly add measurement, weight, strength and resonance across all the parameters to upgrade a B to a D. The D is obviously the instrument for the big stage, but the B is still a Steinway with all the Steinway trimmings. I'd love to have one!

Shoosh

Dave Connor wrote:A Hamburg B is considered the cream of the cream by many.

Crimminey.

I had to change my diaper after that statement.

A Hamburg B is my DREEEEEEAAAAAAAAM piano.

Ugh!!

The most delicious and perfect sounding piano that I ever played was a 1930s Steinway Baby Grand. I could have bought this gem for $40,000, but I had neither the room nor the spare cash.

Shooshie, with all this talk about comparing digital and real pianos (once again), and now learning how much experience you have had in recording with both, I sure would love to hear that comparison test that you spoke of a while back. Maybe while we're waiting for DP 6 and your upcoming DP tutorials you could throw together some kind of piano recordings comparison test?

I know this is too much to ask... and I wouldn't want the pressure to do such a thing myself... so I apologize for asking. But I had to throw it out there.

A Shooshie-tweaked Pianotech (how do they spell it?) instance through his recently-discovered forest ambience oughta bring a tear to the eye.

Frodo wrote:

Dave Connor wrote:A Hamburg B is considered the cream of the cream by many.

Crimminey.

I had to change my diaper after that statement.

A Hamburg B is my DREEEEEEAAAAAAAAM piano.

Ugh!!

Let me put it this way: I've always wanted a B, if possible a Hamburg. I tried to buy a D but didn't have the 30 g's. I ended up with a C (Yamaha - still 20 g's.)

So in my world pianos are as easy as - A B C D but sometimes not enough G's.

Dave Connor wrote: Let me put it this way: I've always wanted a B, if possible a Hamburg. I tried to buy a D but didn't have the 30 g's. I ended up with a C (Yamaha - still 20 g's.)

So in my world pianos are as easy as - A B C D but sometimes not enough G's.

LOL Dave!

I haven't read through the thread, however if you are in no rush I would not buy anything until you hear the Garritan Steinway library. It will be out this month and is the only library approved by Steinway. The feature set for it sounds like it will be a great library.

-Kevin

IAMLFO wrote:I would not buy anything until you hear the Garritan Steinway library. It will be out this month and is the only library approved by Steinway. The feature set for it sounds like it will be a great library.

Are you sure about this? The Garritan website says the expected release is Winter 2008. I would suspect that is at the end of the year? Have you got different information? I would definitely be interested in this library.

Winter is generally considered the first season of the year... until a product slips... and slips... and slips... .

I think it's a matter of perspective: Dave Connor's posts are more from the point of view of a player AFAICT. I think most of the rest of us are focused on the resulting sound as recorded and played back through (most commonly) two speakers. Both perspectives are legitimate as the level of inspiration of the player during the session will affect the interpretation and thus the level of enjoyment of the recording, technical qualities aside.

Shooshie, I'm curious what your two non-intuitive mic choices were, if it isn't a trade secret? My songwriting partner bought a Yammie grand last year, so we're going to be doing some "live" piano sessions later this year (under his cathedral-roof ceilings!) and I've been wondering if I should start experimenting with some of these newer mics coming out recently that are special-purposed for piano recording (they come in many flavours, including ribbon, boundary, omni, etc.).

I did a lot of acoustic piano recording through the 70's and 80's, and even though I was only a teenager through young adult, I seem to have stumbled upon a good choice both in placement and in mics (two AKG C414's as I recall), but by now it's been many years since I've had regular access to acoustic pianos for recording purposes, and though those recordings still hold up to the test of time, they were not "professionally informed" by the opinions and experiences of experts, so I am eager to learn all that I can from those who have walked that road.

While I agree that NI's actual samples for Akoustik Piano are quite good, I feel that the overall programming is poor and idealised for those playing from synth-action keybeds (which is their assumption of the majority of users, after speaking to them at NAMM last year), and while people with Shooshie's experience can probably tweak it without hundreds of hours of labour involved, I think it would be frustrating for a newcomer to sample-based synthesis. So Ivory would be the better choice right out of the box. But again, there will be challenges in CPU and memory usage and latency, which will take a couple of hours (at least) to configure in a way that the session will be idealised for the player.

I've just got to weigh in...

First, I really like the suggestion that the studio be moved to the piano. Now you're thinking! The client will be so proud to be able to say his masterpiece was recorded "right here in this room, on my piano!" A little temporary acoustic treatment and good mic placement can make a moderate to (almost) bad-sounding room perfectly useable. Sounds like a possible winner here.

Second, I use Ivory every day, and love performing on it. The point made regarding "we like what we know" is solid... I relish playing the Ivory samples via my weighted plastic Roland 88's. The recordings I make this way sound absolutely fantastic. My fans go wild. Depending on the style of the piece, a recording of Ivory may be indistinguishable from that of a real piano. I am ecstatic to have this tool at my disposal.

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. The effect is most apparent when pedaling on long sustained chords: an ethereal, sometimes sublime, sheen that is perfectly in tune with the performance.

The above said, I find that a good VI recording often sounds better than a real piano recording. Clearer, with less bothersome resonance to interfere with a pop mix. Always in tune. Plus, it is a lot quicker to set up, and so easy to fix that one bad note in an otherwise perfect performance.

I guess I'm not quite ready to toss ye ol' piano into the trashheap of history. But for me to bother recording a real piano, it had better be a good one!

mhschmieder wrote:Shooshie, I'm curious what your two non-intuitive mic choices were, if it isn't a trade secret?

I've emailed you the answers.

Shooshie

HCMarkus wrote: 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. The effect is most apparent when pedaling on long sustained chords: an ethereal, sometimes sublime, sheen that is perfectly in tune with the performance.

This is a very important aspect of sympathetic vibrations which occur in quantity and complexity under natural circumstances, indeed.

The Blüthner Model One takes this concept a step further, and somewhere on their page of samples there is a demo of how it and six other unnamed piano VIs handle this very feature. (I was surprised at how good all the piano VIs in the demo sounded overall.)

>> EDIT: here's the mp3 link demoing what they call "true sustain":

http://www.proaudiovault.com/BDMO_Comparison_ex1.mp3

I can't make "too much" of a judgement about how this aspect is emulated successfully or unsuccessfully only because on mixes other than those where the piano (real or fake) is truly exposed-- at slower tempos, too boot-- to some degree a lot of this sonic feature tends to get lost in a mire of gates, comps, drums, and guitars.

I don't have the Blüthner piano, myself-- and am just an Ivory kid-- fwiw.

I do think it is important to have some degree of this sustain feature-- and, if possible, some degree of control over it with sampled pianos.

Isn't that what the "Resonance" control in Ivory simulates? Not that it could do as good a job as Mother Nature's resonance, but at least we got something.

Frodo wrote:The Blüthner Model One takes this concept a step further, and somewhere on their page of samples there is a demo of how it and six other unnamed piano VIs handle this very feature. (I was surprised at how good all the piano VIs in the demo sounded overall.)

>> EDIT: here's the mp3 link demoing what they call "true sustain":

http://www.proaudiovault.com/BDMO_Comparison_ex1.mp3

I can't make "too much" of a judgement about how this aspect is emulated successfully or unsuccessfully only because on mixes other than those where the piano (real or fake) is truly exposed-- at slower tempos, too boot-- to some degree a lot of this sonic feature tends to get lost in a mire of gates, comps, drums, and guitars.

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?


Shooshie

Shooshie wrote:Isn't that what the "Resonance" control in Ivory simulates? Not that it could do as good a job as Mother Nature's resonance, but at least we got something.

Yes, Shoosh. That's exactly what that does. As mentioned, I'm reluctant to make a qualitative judgement only having used Ivory, but I enjoyed the Blüthner demo because it included several side-by-side samples in succession.

Resonance aside-- or "true sustain"-- I just enjoyed hearing different piano samples themselves back to back.