What's up with Piano velocity layers?

[P.T.]

I have a number of piano soundfonts (sf2). None of them are huge, but they all have a few velocity layers.

The problem is that there is a very large cut in high frequencies as I play softer.

Now, I have played some real pianos and playing harder or softer does change the sound, but not anywhere near as drastically as these soundfonts do.
A real piano doesn't noticably lose it's high frequencies when played softly.

With these soundfonts playing louder or softer sounds like completely different pianos.

Am I doing something wrong?

I've got Gary Dere's Clavinova piano, Roland nice piano, Pianissimum, Hubbe's piano's and I few others.

These are nice sounding pianos, but I find I have to make the notes all the same volume or they become unusable.

By the way, I don't have a velocity sensitive keyboard yet and have been entering notes either with a mouse or with my computer keyboard (using Trollo) and then changing velocities in the piano roll editor. Could this have anything to do with it?

[joto]

By the way, I don't have a velocity sensitive keyboard yet and have been entering notes either with a mouse or with my computer keyboard (using Trollo) and then changing velocities in the piano roll editor. Could this have anything to do with it?

Yes.

My guess is that you are using way too much velocity difference when programming. Remember, velocity 1 is supposed to be what happens when you slowly move the key downwards until you can vaguely notice that there is some vibration in the strings. And 127 is supposed to be what it sounds like when you nearly break your finger hitting the key.

Well, in theory anyway. In practice, velocity response varies. Different soundfont users have different keyboards with different response, and they use different playing styles.

Download some standard midi files you like, to see more realistic velocity usage.

[DevonB]

Drawing curves in is going to really f**k with the sound. There is a difference between playing the same sample set on a piano weighted keyboard vs a synth weighted, so much so that I've had people wonder if I was playing the same piano or not, when I had the same sample set loaded. So drawing in by hand is going to be even worse.

Devon

[AnotherBob]

Try to keep velocity values around 100 and range between 70 and 120. See if that improves the sound.

[atomic_(no)afro]

One thing to note as well is that many sample libraries (cheap ones especially), and some samplers by default apply a LPF to velocity so that the softer one plays a note, the lower the cutoff frequency goes. This may explain why certain high frequencies are rolled off when you play back your soundfonts. Be sure to check if there are any strange velocity tracked filter settings associated with these patches.

ATA

[Stupid American Pig]

To add to atomic afros remarks- This is also done in order to "skimp" on the number of samplesthat a sound designer would have to use. Many use LPF instead of another set of samples, which, depending on the decay times could be 1/2 as big. The problem is that the filters in most soundfont players and even the creative soundfont hardware is that the filters are weak.

Although most of the time I would chalk it up to inexperience on the sound designers part. I know the first couple of sound fonts I made were horrendous...

[Kim Lajoie]

The problem is that the filters in most soundfont players and even the creative soundfont hardware is that the filters are weak.

Huh? You want strong filters to play back a sampled piano?

Forever,




Kim.

[djones]

I have an akai sample cd called The ultimate piano collection.
This cd is supposed to contain 4 pianos, The Boesndorfer, A Fazioli and 2 Steinberg pianos, I think c and d.
But I never understood what to load and what not to load up into Halion.
When I throw in this cd this shows up: in the most left part of the import screen there's the selection of pianos, Boesndorfer, BoesndorferLoud and Boesndorfer3000, the same goes for the other pianos.
In the middle of the screen it show the different velocity layers like Bsd24Low, Bsd24Mid and Bsd24High (I'm not sure if there really is a mid), than the 16 second samples are below I think as Bsd16Low and so on.
Well, now I have about 9 different categories, if I just select the Boesndorfer in the most left part of the screen and press the import button, it loads up each categorie in it's own Halion channel .
Or I could choose to pile all these samples on top of each other in just one channel, but when I play a key on my keyboard this damn Halion triggeres all the High, low, long, short samples, about 5, 6 piano samples.

I used to have Gigasampler LE, but that crashed all the time on me when I got my Pulsar 1 card, but Gigasampler wouldn't make any trouble for me when loading up the gigapiano, all the different velocity layers were placed correct.
What do I need to do?
I'd still like to use these samples.
Thanks for your help.

[lkingston]

A little history is in order:

The Soundfont 2.0 format has no way of routing velocity to filter cutoff.

The Soundfont 2.1 format allows the programmer to route velocity to filter cutoff.

Most Soundfonts are programmed for the SF 2.0 format as this is the only one that the Soundblaster Live can play and there are a whole lot of Soundblaster Live soundcards out there. The way Soundfont 2.0 programmers get around this inability to route velocity to the filter cutoff frequency is to program a bunch of different velocity switched layers, with the lower velocities having more high frequency cut and the higher velocities allowing more high frequencies through. The problem is that there is a lot of variation in different controllers, and worse than that the velocity layers are horribly out of calibration when they are played back on other SoundFont playback engines. Anyway, my guess is that this situation is the source of your problem. Most software Soundfont players do a pretty good job at most sounds, but never quite get all the filter layers in piano sounds quite right.

Laurence Kingston

[P.T.]

I generally tend to like the highest velocity sound on these soundfonts.
Is there any way to turn off the velocity layers and just have the one sound (the high velocity, bright sound)? I want to be able to control the volume of my individual midi notes but don't want these big changes in timbre.

I am using Sfz soundfont player and do not use a soundblaster card. I guess I could use some suggestions
for a soundfont editing application.