Synthesising an acoustic piano sound

[9b0]

I recently realized that I owned Audiority's "Modular Piano" and the author links to a (very limited) discussion of his work in Reaktor that led to the sample library. He (Luca Capozzi) doesn't give any real detail on the internals, but there are some videos that show the sound of his Reaktor patch as well as the sampled Kontakt instrument.

I know about the Reaktor instrument, but the author never made anything public about the patch itself. In his Youtube description, he claims using regular oscillators and filters, so the patch could be something that is similar to what bmanic did with the Twin (based on the SOS article).

Also, I'm not sure that I'd ever use it. Synthesizing a piano seems like something that's more fun to do as a learning exercise than to use in a track.

I'm not sure if I'm ever going to use the piano in production (as a piano), but I know, that I prefer my synthesized string patches over string libraries. Simply because of flexibility and instant loading times. The two use cases I can imagine for my piano patch are:
1. using it as an unrealistic piano with extreme settings,
2. building a string model node for Alpha Forever based on the experiences I gain through this process

[9b0]

Several years passed by since I last posted to this thread, but I'm still getting back to piano synthesis every few months.

This is the current state of my process:


I think,this is getting pretty damn close to sound really good.

[mjolnir]

@9b0: that's pretty impressive. i prefer acoustic piano multisamples, but what you showed there is also very impressive. i'm amazed at the state of the art. i grew up on acoustic piano so i'm sensitive to the differences. usually synthetic sounds totally fake. but anyways, in a mix a lot of different techniques could work. i think Alicia Keys uses synths.

[Fannon]

Don't have a Digitone, but I found this impressive (it sounds a bit lofi / felted):