KVR Audio

Uncle E · Post by **Uncle E** » Sat Aug 27, 2016 9:00 am

fisherKing wrote:have my macbook pro at a collab's place today (running thru her audio interface/monitors). she has a steinway grand, so... we compared. pianoteq is good, and great to play, but it does not sound real next to the steinway, it IS a little 'plastic'- sounding. it lacks the harmonic qualities, the 'wood' quality of the real piano (best i can describe it).

Which Pianoteq instrument were you using?

kiezum · Post by **kiezum** » Sat Aug 27, 2016 1:30 pm

murnau wrote: It's a pleasure to play pieces of a certain decade with a piano(sound) it was written for.

You can of course use it for everything else with the right fx and mixing but that is not why i bought it.

Yeah, I was wondering if composing would be easier on piano's that great composers used

But I have to say that it's easier to write baroque pieces on the harpsichord addon of Pianoteq.

murnau · Post by **murnau** » Sat Aug 27, 2016 3:09 pm

kiezum wrote:Yeah, I was wondering if composing would be easier on piano's that great composers used

I can confirm that it's unfortunately not easier.

msl · Post by **msl** » Sat Aug 27, 2016 5:05 pm

fisherKing wrote:have my macbook pro at a collab's place today (running thru her audio interface/monitors). she has a steinway grand, so... we compared. pianoteq is good, and great to play, but it does not sound real next to the steinway, it IS a little 'plastic'- sounding. it lacks the harmonic qualities, the 'wood' quality of the real piano (best i can describe it).

From your description it sounds like you compared the sound of Pianoteq played through monitors to the sound of Steinway grand sitting in the room. Is that correct? I suspect that monitors are not going to move the air in quite the same way as the strings and soundboard of a grand piano, regardless of what you are playing through them. Perhaps recording the piano and comparing the two sounds through the same monitors is about the best you are going to get to a straight comparison.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sat Aug 27, 2016 6:42 pm

^^^^ Absolutely correct. Same thing with ampsims and real amps - you gotta compare the ampsim to the recorded real amp.

murnau · Post by **murnau** » Sat Aug 27, 2016 7:23 pm

msl wrote:
fisherKing wrote:have my macbook pro at a collab's place today (running thru her audio interface/monitors). she has a steinway grand, so... we compared. pianoteq is good, and great to play, but it does not sound real next to the steinway, it IS a little 'plastic'- sounding. it lacks the harmonic qualities, the 'wood' quality of the real piano (best i can describe it).
From your description it sounds like you compared the sound of Pianoteq played through monitors to the sound of Steinway grand sitting in the room. Is that correct? I suspect that monitors are not going to move the air in quite the same way as the strings and soundboard of a grand piano, regardless of what you are playing through them. Perhaps recording the piano and comparing the two sounds through the same monitors is about the best you are going to get to a straight comparison.

It's like firing up a sampled orchester lib in Kontakt while listening to a real symphonic orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall? Makes not much sense does it?

Twrogstudio · Post by **Twrogstudio** » Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:02 pm

After playing more and more with the demo over the last few days my impression hasn't, but one thing I think is important when comparing to other pianos is getting under the hood and tweaking. I find the presets a little bit plain in some cases. If I were to open it, select a few presets and compare to my favourite sampled piano(s) it sounds a bit flat, but it was only when I started to play with the action, voicing, soundboard settings that my opinion completely changed. I honestly think a lot of the naysayers, bearing in mind I was one, tend to base their opinions on minimal experimentation. Not all. It's fair enough that not everybody will have the same opinion, but I really do believe that if more people dug a little deeper their opinnions would shift considerably.

murnau · Post by **murnau** » Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:30 pm

Twrogstudio wrote:After playing more and more with the demo over the last few days my impression hasn't, but one thing I think is important when comparing to other pianos is getting under the hood and tweaking. I find the presets a little bit plain in some cases. If I were to open it, select a few presets and compare to my favourite sampled piano(s) it sounds a bit flat, but it was only when I started to play with the action, voicing, soundboard settings that my opinion completely changed. I honestly think a lot of the naysayers, bearing in mind I was one, tend to base their opinions on minimal experimentation. Not all. It's fair enough that not everybody will have the same opinion, but I really do believe that if more people dug a little deeper their opinnions would shift considerably.

Damn right statement!

ariston · Post by **ariston** » Sun Aug 28, 2016 12:40 pm

Giving the mint-worn slider a flick to the right will also work wonders for getting that "it's real" vibe.

asksol · Post by **asksol** » Sun Aug 28, 2016 10:31 pm

I'm not really into Pianoteq for the pianos at all, what I like it for is to create new acoustic sounding instruments.

With Pro you even can map different parameter ranges to keys, e.g brighter in the bass notes, or make it sounds more like a prepared instrument. It's excellent for experimental music. The historical add-ons make for some interesting instruments when you modify them, but I read somewhere on the forum that the KVIR free instruments are maybe even better. The instruments are certainly well modeled, but Pianoteq is much more interesting than that.

mladi · Post by **mladi** » Sat Dec 31, 2016 9:46 pm

I only hope that Pianoteq will bring out Ibach Expansion one day.

RamblinWreck · Post by **RamblinWreck** » Sat Jan 14, 2017 4:01 pm

asksol wrote:I'm not really into Pianoteq for the pianos at all, what I like it for is to create new acoustic sounding instruments.

With Pro you even can map different parameter ranges to keys, e.g brighter in the bass notes, or make it sounds more like a prepared instrument. It's excellent for experimental music. The historical add-ons make for some interesting instruments when you modify them, but I read somewhere on the forum that the KVIR free instruments are maybe even better. The instruments are certainly well modeled, but Pianoteq is much more interesting than that.

That's actually something I was wondering when I first learned about Pianoteq, how far can it be pushed? I'm no pianist, so I haven't really had a need for realistic piano sounds, but I do really love the idea of physically modeled sounds that don't sound like any actual instrument. Is there anywhere I can listen to someone using Pianoteq this way?

BlackWinny · Post by **BlackWinny** » Sat Jan 14, 2017 4:35 pm

Chain the outputs of Pianoteq into the audio inputs of any effect (crusher, distortion, phaser, flanger...) or even of any synthesizer usable as effect meaning having audio inputs (FM8, MS-20, Synthmaster, XILS-3 or 4...) or into a vocoder (the free TAL-Vocoder for example) and have fun!

Tons of ideas can arise by experimenting that way...

Also look at these very interesting videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h56Qy-nZOOs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVTF0iK9y08

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idQrRBSpZ5w

Krakatau · Post by **Krakatau** » Sat Jan 14, 2017 10:24 pm

RamblinWreck wrote:
asksol wrote:I'm not really into Pianoteq for the pianos at all, what I like it for is to create new acoustic sounding instruments.

With Pro you even can map different parameter ranges to keys, e.g brighter in the bass notes, or make it sounds more like a prepared instrument. It's excellent for experimental music. The historical add-ons make for some interesting instruments when you modify them, but I read somewhere on the forum that the KVIR free instruments are maybe even better. The instruments are certainly well modeled, but Pianoteq is much more interesting than that.
That's actually something I was wondering when I first learned about Pianoteq, how far can it be pushed? I'm no pianist, so I haven't really had a need for realistic piano sounds, but I do really love the idea of physically modeled sounds that don't sound like any actual instrument. Is there anywhere I can listen to someone using Pianoteq this way?

this perhaps could (also) be a good base, if you allow me...

http://www.kvraudio.com/product/pianote ... /downloads

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sun Jan 15, 2017 9:12 am

Here's an example of how can Pianoteq be pushed (all sounds here by Pianoteq):

http://users.telenet.be/deridderpiet.be ... Sounds.mp3

Pianoteq 5 is out!