Pianoteq Reviewed by a Piano Tech | 1/3 | Tuning, Temperament, Voicing
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- Опубліковано 25 лип 2024
- @modarttvideos Pianoteq is a really unique and powerful software instrument using "physical modeling" as opposed to traditional sampling methods, giving it power beyond what a sample library could ever offer, while still being highly realistic to even a well-trained ear. As someone who works on instruments professionally, and loves tweaking and playing around with different sounds, I love it.
In this part 1 of 3, I cover information about Pianoteq, do some demos of different piano sounds, and talk about the tuning/temperament, and voicing options. Stay tuned for the next episodes, which will go more in depth about other tonal options and different instruments.
*I reached out to Modartt with interest in reviewing their software, which I'm very impressed by, and they offered me a good discount, hence the "paid promotion" - however, they didn't pay me or tell me what to say, all thoughts are my own*
To learn more about Pianoteq, check out the Modartt website:
www.modartt.com/pianoteq
Chapters:
0:00-4:24 About Pianoteq
4:24-9:35 Demo
9:35-14:15 Pricing
14:15-17:32 NY vs. HB Steinway D
17:32-21:59 Other Pianos
21:59-35:07 Tuning
35:07-40:47 Voicing
#piano #pianoteq #digitalpiano
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Love this series!
Great video, really informative, will be watching the other parts
Anyway, thanks for your interesting videos. I have clicked like and subscribed.
I bought it and all i can say is that its great
Just a quick comment: You can compare two presets by using the A/B switch. Very usefull sometimes.
with the "c" shortcut
The Grotrian and Bluethner pianos are very sweet.
I love how everything you play is archived
every single note you play is saved
you can play for a couple days
go into the archive
and every session has a midi file with date and time
its so great
the electric pianos, the hofner series
it sux, too perfect and sterile, lounge lizard or stage 73 blows all the pianoteq electrics away
but it is my preferred practice vst for real piano, its not the best, but its fast, small, and always records everything
love it.
my main piano is the grotrian 1956
You mention pianoteq to piano techs...and they laugh...I think its great... not just to replace a real piano but for teaching piano mechanics. I took piano tuning lessons just long enough to tune my own grand...but constant tuning and maintenance got old quick. Switched to digital...and settled on pianoteq...I really dont miss my old piano.
I certainly love working on the real deal, but for home practice I don't think it can be beat, especially with a nice MIDI controller. Some techs might turn their nose up at anything digital, but Pianoteq was created by a piano tech, so he didn't think it was a dumb idea haha
Most technicians are on the older side, but I grew up working on computers first, so it's great to see two of my interests combined like this!
@@NickLeonard I have no problem replacing my real grand with pianoteq at all for live performance. I use two stereo sound outputs thru PA systems...I assign mics to each separate speaker...if I turn it up...it vibrates the room and your legs...lol
@@zumadale It certainly has it's advantages haha. I've even seen some people gutting uprights and putting a digital piano in for a more "authentic" look. I wouldn't condone that unless the instrument is going to the dump anyways, but a good use of the old cabinet if you have a permanent stage setup. Of course, there's lot's of situations where you want an acoustic piano, but for everything else, Pianoteq is amazing.
very kool
Hi Nick, thank you very much for the comprehensive video series. I was looking for a long time for such a video, teaching how to actually tune a virtual instrument. I have an off-topic question - how do you like the RH3 keyboard on the Korg D1 that you use?
I just saw, that you have a video with a review of Korg D1. I guess, I'll find the answer there.
Have you tried out Pianoteq? What do you think of it?
It's the most realistic piano VSTi there is. I don't know why people call it 'plasticy,' they'll find a reason to put anything down.
It's in the top 3 in virtual pianos for me.maybe it holds the 1st place
@@adownbeatexegete1549 I promise I want to love Pianoteq, but I find it plasticy compared to something like VSL :/ I'm not at hater, quite the contrary actually, but...
It could be my untrained ear too, but something sounds quite fake compared to other VSTs.
I last tried version two way back in 2006 ? and loved it, although at the time it was receiving criticism. I just think that good modeling is the way to go, and that they usually get somewhere close enough in the end. This version seven is absolutely stunning.
@@EgoShredder I haven't tried the older versions, but even the improvements from v6 to v7 were great!
Many people in the music industry and its associated communities keep talking (snobbishly) about "real pianos" as though the acoustic variety is sacred, immaculate, unchangeable, and the electronic/digital variety is little more than a toy. This is bigotry, particularly when most piano music is no longer even practised on acoustic pianos.
I'm glad that this piano technician is taking digital technology seriously. Furthermore, while the modelling side of digital musical technology is still very young, it does at least offer infinite possibilities, unlike acoustic instruments and samples. The idea that we need only to replicate a nice/great acoustic piano to reach Nirvada is floored. We should be creating the best possible instruments, without stopping when we reach the limitations of today's acoustic technology. I still love my acoustic instruments and my digital pianos, which are sampled. Right now, I believe they offer the best sounds, but I try to think outside the box, and accordingly I believe that modelling will be extremely important soon, if it isn't already.
Is anybody seriously arguing that the invention of digital photography was a mistake? Do many people speak as though digital cameras are not "real cameras"? If you can play piano music on an instrument without doing great injustice to the music, well then, it's a piano.
There are, of course, drawbacks with both, but being a technician and recording acoustic pianos, I know how much goes into it. Not to mention nothing beats editing MIDI ;)
For a top notch acoustic recording or sample library, you need of course a great piano, which has to not only be tuned right before the session, but also checked over for regulation and action noise and performance issues. All of that gets extremely expensive. You have to have a good room acoustically, and a variety of high end mics. All of that is thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Obviously out of reach of most people. You could pay a few hundred and go to a good studio, which if you're doing a solo piano album is the way to go. You could try recording your average home piano with budget mics, but you should at least get it tuned before, which will be about 150-200, more if there's repairs and regulation that needs to be done. The voicing will likely be all over the place, and most uprights and small grands don't have a big sound or good bass if that's what you're after. It may be more real and more unique and that can be great for certain styles, not so much a modern jazz or classical performance.
There are advantages and disadvantages to samples vs modeling, but you can't beat the freedom and creativity of modeling.
Another thing I think trips people up is hearing a real piano while playing vs listening to a recorded/sampled/modeled piano through their headphones and monitors and feeling like it's not real enough. At least compare apples to apples. A great acoustic recording vs a plugin, not your memory of playing a piano in the room!
Many people in the music industry have no clue about music and technology history, and about many other things, to be honest ;) As Nick probably knows better than me, keyboard instruments have evolved quite a bit along the CENTURIES, the pianos we play today are the ones Beethoven played and so on and so forth. Add organs, the electromechanical stuff, transistor organs, electric pianos, clavinets, synths... the list goes on forever. To a lesser extent, that is also true for the guitar, and so on. So, 'REAL piano' hardly means anything.
People just love having fights over anything: analogue vs digital, Mac vs PC, Linux vs Unix, this DAW vs all the others, Fender vs Gibson, Steinway vs Yamaha, my team vs your team, and so on and on.
Even though with technology there IS a risk of something (or someone!) being replaced sooner or later, or at least being vastly reduced in significance, esp. now with AI, these are beautiful tools which CAN give opportunities to many more people who, for whatever reason, cannot afford or do not want, 'the real thing'. Besides, many accomplished pianists love and use Pianoteq, and the fact that big names like Steinway and Bechstein endorsed and allowed their brands to be used, speaks volumes. Unlike in many sample libraries ;)
Digital photography DID replace analogue photography, for instance, pros and cons. A different beast in some ways. A good photographer is a good photographer, anyway. Elton John and others already used digital pianos, expanders, etc. decades ago in concert.
As you rightly point out: just make music and be happy ;)
@@NickLeonard Agreed. A fun fact is that Beethoven often used 73-key pianos, putting a lie to the argument that every student needs 88 keys. He also valued the robust nature of British pianos like Broadwood. Sometimes he could be very practical, unlike certain snobs I have met. And before Beethoven there were composers like Mozart, Haydn and Bach who only used primitive predecessors to the pianoforte as we know it. How anybody can insist they need an 88-key acoustic pianoforte to play their music... this just baffles me.
Thanks Nick, I really appreciate you translating the piano tech in pianoteq for those of us who can't even tuna fish (sorry). One of the most useful tips you gave was treating the individual note aftertones(?) like an equalizer. As strange as it seems to me after watching this, I hadn't thought of the keyboard as playing different discrete frequencies from low to high and equating it with bands on an equalizer. I have Keyscape, but I can really see an advantage in being able to really dial in a particular sound for a particular song. I think I'm going to pick this up.
I don't know if there is any sound design reason I would need from getting the pro instead of the standard, do you have any thoughts? I always research these things a lot and get more and more enamored with the really good ones. It seems to me that the additional packs, at $59, would be worth it compared to some of the ones I've seen for Komplete, for example.
Thanks again!
Thanks, Scott! You mean overtones, or sometimes upper order harmonics. Every instrument has them, and the strength of each dictates a lot of an instrument's unique timbre.
As for versions, Standard already has a ton of features, in pro you get access to higher sample rates (irrelevant for the vast majority of us) and individual (per-string) note tuning. Also something I don't think many people would ever touch. It allows you to actually change the pitch of the individual strings in each unison, but you can still detune evenly in standard. There may be some other features, but personally, I'd stick with standard and spend the extra on more instrument packs.
No need to be sorry about the fish part.
27:55 I love microtonality. It's more difficult to setup in our 12et world though.
27:47 I noticed the 11/8 interval immediately. To my ears, it sounds completely resonant, but to others, it is an unfamiliar sound. The size of 11/8 in the Carlos Alpha scale reminds me of 22edo’s 11/8 approximation at ~545 cents (545 cents vs. 546 cents is an imperceptible difference).
Hi Nick , thanks for this review, do you think the roland fp10 will pair well with pianoteq?
yeah, looks like it has MIDI over usb, so it should work fine
I bought a Roland FP-30X to finally learn the piano at 28 (not trying to produce music etc.). In your opinion, which is the best plugin to take the Roland’s sound to the next level? Just started learning about all the available plugins, but I heard about Garritan CFX, Keyscape’s C7, Ravenscroft 275, Pianoteq (to mention a few), are great. What’s your opinion?
Also, trying to load Garritan CFX on a Roland FP-30X connected to a desktop PC but I can feel the latency affecting my playing. I can around 2 ms latency but it still feels “slow”. Don’t know if my brain is making this up. How do you load the plugin (VST, Standalone)? How can someone “eliminate” latency, to replicate the feel of a real piano?
What is the most responsive (lowest latency) plugin in your experience? Maybe Pianoteq?
Currently using Reaper as my choice of DAW (tried Ableton too), I’ve set the Sample Rate to the maximum of 384 kHz that my Chord Mojo DAC supports, which lowered the latency instantly, and now I’m experimenting with the Buffer size, around 128-256 samples, keeping in mind how my system responds, so as to avoid cracks and pops. I’ve also got a Ryzen 3600 system, which handles all this pretty fine I’d say. Still feels kinda slow.
Pianoteq is slightly more CPU hungry (but still quite low) compared to a sampler, but a sampler has to load from disk, so best results there would be an internal SSD. I haven't had any latency problems with Kontakt libraries off an internal SSD. I don't know anything about that DAC, but for low latency, you should be using ASIO drivers and I don't know if that unit supports them since it's not designed as an audio interface from the looks of it.
Any audio interface should be capable of under 10ms round trip latency, which will be higher than the stated latency, unless it also tells you the roundtrip number like focusrite does. You can test with the free RTL Utility program. Under 10ms shouldn't be perceptible, my focusrite gets as low as 6.5-7.5 ms and I don't notice it.
Ravenscroft 275
I'd suggest Production Voices 300 Grand.
I've always found the idea of octave stretching strange, but I guess psychoacoustics isn't an easy subject to understand. Probably unrelated, but I find I quite often hear bass notes as sharper than they really are. On many occasions I've listened to music that begins with a loud bass part, my brain has assumed a key for the music, and then the rest of the track comes in and it's about a semitone flatter than I expected. It's so odd!
A bass note on a stretched piano, or something like a guitar or synth that's not stretched?
Octave stretching also has to do with overtones and that's a matter of string length and thickness. A small spinet will have a greater degree of stretching compared to a 9' concert grand. Typically on a concert instrument, I'll be looking at around 10 or so cents flat on bass and that much or a little more sharp on treble. On a very small upright it might be more like 30 cents!
@@NickLeonard Thanks for the reply! 30 cents would perhaps be noticeable to me I suppose, but I'm talking about a much larger difference, and I think it's more to do with perceived pitch than harmonics. I do play piano but as a piano tech you obviously know far more than I do about those subtleties! The music I was thinking of is usually either rock of some sort with a bass guitar, or something synthetic like EDM. Basically a bass note can be perfectly "in tune" but I hear it as up to a semitone sharper than it actually is. I've never really explored this, so perhaps some research is needed. I was wondering whether other people have had the same experience.
19:58 you might have heard of many Kawai piano sounds? Do you think the K2 is very close to that?
I'd have to try and compare again, but the K2 is an original piano designed by Modartt, not modeled after a Kawai
Buena review. Una pregunta Por qué te pone demo?
Gracias, pero mi español es muy malo, no intiende jaja.
@@NickLeonard oh sorry haha my question is why does the demo appear in the vst?
@@freetown10 the demo file I played was from a MIDI file that I added into Reaper, if that's what you mean
@@NickLeonard I mean, in the interface of your pianoteq, it says "demo" as if it weren't the full version.
@@freetown10 oh I see, it is the full version, standard comes with 3 instrument packs, so there are more I could buy, but it doesn't include the full range of instruments unless you get the studio bundle with everything, but you can demo everything, just without some keys working
What's your Midi Keyboard?
Korg D1
What is the full name of the track by Beethoven?
Sonata No.31 in A-flat Major, Op.110. ua-cam.com/video/H3S8slvoHoU/v-deo.html
Nick, I have a question for you as you're a piano technician, please: when playing a note VERY slowly on an acoustic piano, should I hear something or is it completely silent? Not sure if I explained myself well. Sorry but I'm Italian. Thanks.
It should be silent. The escapement mechanism will trigger before the key strikes the strings if you go slowly enough.
@@NickLeonard Thank you so much!
just wondering in the pro version can you tune each individual string like a real piano.
Yes, it says so on their site. On the standard version you can set the total unision width as well as the pitch of the note, but not the individual strings in the unison
@@NickLeonard I found piano tuning simulator from tunelabs download section just to practice tuning by ear .thats what i was going to use the pro version for. i may still upgrade from my stage 7 version. i love Pianoteq its so lifelike and i still like tuning my old upright. Thanks !
What's a good action (digital piano) would you recommend with pianoteq. Are there any actions you think get close to the average grand piano? I mean, with the exception of the nv5 and nv10.
I use the Korg D1 (RH3) and I recommend it, you can check out my review video!
Are you using a windows PC or a Mac
I use Windows, and my DAW is Reaper
and now version 7.5 :)
lol, the graphical keyboard at the bottom actually slides over when the una corda pedal is depressed.
I do love that attention to detail
I hear the same muddiness as in every other VST synth. In particular in the lows and upper lows. It's also missing analog depths, dimension and convincing punch/transients energy. The "instruments" are also exceptional static. It's such a letdown. Thank you for the video.
Velocity is one area ir excels in, but if you don't like the tone...
Of course, there's a ton that goes into recording piano and especially maintaining an instrument for recording!
@@NickLeonard yes, that's for sure. :)
last year I bought a Cassio CDP-S100, horrible piano sound experience of couse, so I got Pianoteq Stage since I am not a tuning expert. It is difficult to put into words, I may be wrong on this one but I still hate the middle C area, just like any digital piano this area sounds "digital", I can pickup a "toyish" tone right away, which is very evident when hitting the notes harder 19:47 (velocity value 70 upwards), when I compare any of the models they have to sampled ones it kind of saddens me. Perhaps the real deal sounds like that very up-close and I am complaining as an ignorant.
by the way, 35:25 this "mellow" effect sounds like they just muffle the sounds whereas they bright one they go on the complete opposite direction, 35:46 makes me go like "yeah, this IS a digital piano".
Anyway, Pianoteq is very light on the cpu and storage requirements, it has Sympathetic resonance and other good stuff plus most I've heard praise it for being more like the real deal when it comes to playing the keys unlike sampled stuff, in the near future we will surely see great enhancements for sure.
I do think it's very accurate, nothing is perfect, of course. Consider also the microphones and their placement, as well as the room. I'm not sure which libraries you were comparing it too, but if you replicate a similar mic and reverb setup that will get it closer. Many samplers also have more post EQ and noise reduction baked in, something pianoteq doesn't need. It could be a certain frequency range you just don't like that you can easily eq out
@@NickLeonard Thank you for the prompt feedback, you do have good points, replicating the whole setup used in the samplings or even what we hear in videos from real pianos would get closer to what the general public ends up getting used to, the recordings. Based on your last sentences I will explore the EQ parts and room setup, I can't play with mics in Stage version and would not have proper knowledge to do it. Just for the record, I would like to make pianoteq sound as close as possible to this:
ua-cam.com/video/l4IKYo-CqFQ/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/l4IKYo-CqFQ/v-deo.html
@@carlosroberto366 I don't know what piano models you have, but the NY D on the pop preset is the closest to my ear to this Yamaha. Yamahas tend to be fairly bright and clear. You could also try out 3rd party impulse response-based reverb. Also, adding a little wear with the condition slider or detuning the unisons slightly can add some reaslism
When I click on the links under the video, some garbage is added to addessses afterwards (%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B)
Thanks for pointing that out, not sure why that happened. Fixed now, but I'll have to check my other videos.
Man i wish i could get a discount too
They do rarely have sales
could you please remove the mirror in the background - it freaks me out! (LOL) Thanks for the video!
There is no mirror...
There's a TV with a picture on it, of that's what you mean
Proof that this guy is sellling cr@ck 33:33
thats an ambulance, cuz I'm too sick
I honestly don't like Pianoteq, it doesn't sound realistic to my ears. If you want a better Steinway D, Production Voices Concert Grand is the way to go. There are several options for versions you can buy, ranging from $59 for the Sforzando Compact version, to $329 for the full version for Kontakt, and a couple versions in between.
Don't understand why you play a chord when you are talking about unisons? Pianos have three strings per note in the treble? The unison is just the tuning between those strings? You should just play one note to demonstrate it. In a chord you are playing a third and a fifth.
As a tuner, you should know that you listen to different harmonics when tuning a fifth or a major third. Playing them all together makes unisons virtually impossible to hear, as you are hearing too many harmonics blended together at once.
You have a good point, and I should have also demonstrated the individual notes. However, I find that sometimes it's easier to hear the tuning in the more real-world context of a chord. Yes, it does introduce a lot more harmonics and overtones, but it can also make the "rubbing" of out of tune unisons more apparent. Of course for tuning I don't do that, but it's a good check that the unisons sound good together.