excellent series, nick. it's great to hear a real piano tech explain some of the terms and concepts in Pianoteq that were not familiar to me. i agree that this is a terrific piece of virtual tech -- light years above the competition for many reasons, as you suggest. and it will only get better as time marches on. thanks
Absolutely love pianoteq. I started using layers... combining Petrof with Bluthner or Upright... with Bluthner it combines well with McCartney. A thought just crossed my mind...I wonder if it's possible to assign a piano to a pedal....I play the song Honky Tonk Man by Clint Eastwood...and for the chorus....I wonder if I could hit a pedal and get a honky tonk piano?
I've been playing around with that idea for guitar fx switching. There's a couple of options, in Reaper at least, you can enable auto record arm and bind a pedal to switch to a track with the sound you want, or you could set up a MIDI bind to switch to a preset in Pianoteq. Either way will have a slight hiccup in the sound but I'm trying to figure out a workaround for gapless switching
Well done Nick. I did recently purchase Pianoteq mostly on the back of your review. The intention was to use it as a silent option on a nice Bluthner Grand. I have a QRS optical midi strip on the grand connected to a fairly new and fast i7 windows laptop. The Grand is muted but not completely silent. When played with Pianoteq frankly the latency is annoying. Perhaps it is something one rapidly becomes accustomed to on a digital keyboard, but the slight delay from the muted actual piano sound makes playing particularly at speed difficult. I have done all kinds of tweaks to my laptop but its still quite noticeable. One thing I did that helped quite a bit was to recalibrate the QRS so that it registered the note at letoff instead of full key bottom. I have letoff set quite close on the piano. I am looking at a different computer setup but also considered trying to regulate the QRS even higher by adding a temporary punching to the key front and recalibate the key "bottom" even higher. I can then perhaps calibrate the key velocity at the slow end so that is does not play on a very slow velocity. Any experience of Pianoteq on a piano with an optical midi strip? Regards.
@@NickLeonard I largely solved it just now. By using the regular Windows Driver rather than ASIO, I was able to get down to a fairly low latency that works well. On a similar vein, do you know of a good silencer mechanism for a grand that will not change the feel of the action?
@@rskuhn01 that's good. ASIO is usually the way to go, but whatever works! I don't know of a particular silencer product, but you could try just packing felt or even towels on the strings behind the dampers. That won't change the feel at all and should pretty well silence the strings. Of course there will still be mechanical noise and some resonance of the soundboard, but it'll be pretty quiet
A bit disappointing this series. I would have liked to hear more about a techs view and explanation on voicing, (hammer needling and hard / worn hammers), string length and sympathetic / resonant tones etc. Sound board options. There are dozens of vids demoing the different models and instrument packs and effects but maybe none explaining the piano construction / design settings. You missed a golden opportunity.
Thanks for the feedback, Peter, and you make a good point. There was so much to talk about on the plugin side, that I got caught up in that and lost some of the point of the videos. I'll plan on returning to those topics in a future video!
I'd like to clarify that there were both fretted and unfretted clavichords, so it's not really a mistake to not have it fretted at all.
excellent series, nick. it's great to hear a real piano tech explain some of the terms and concepts in Pianoteq that were not familiar to me. i agree that this is a terrific piece of virtual tech -- light years above the competition for many reasons, as you suggest. and it will only get better as time marches on. thanks
Good video. Think it’s quite helpful for people curious about it!
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching, Astrophil!
Absolutely love pianoteq. I started using layers... combining Petrof with Bluthner or Upright... with Bluthner it combines well with McCartney. A thought just crossed my mind...I wonder if it's possible to assign a piano to a pedal....I play the song Honky Tonk Man by Clint Eastwood...and for the chorus....I wonder if I could hit a pedal and get a honky tonk piano?
I've been playing around with that idea for guitar fx switching. There's a couple of options, in Reaper at least, you can enable auto record arm and bind a pedal to switch to a track with the sound you want, or you could set up a MIDI bind to switch to a preset in Pianoteq. Either way will have a slight hiccup in the sound but I'm trying to figure out a workaround for gapless switching
Well done Nick. I did recently purchase Pianoteq mostly on the back of your review. The intention was to use it as a silent option on a nice Bluthner Grand.
I have a QRS optical midi strip on the grand connected to a fairly new and fast i7 windows laptop. The Grand is muted but not completely silent. When played with Pianoteq frankly the latency is annoying. Perhaps it is something one rapidly becomes accustomed to on a digital keyboard, but the slight delay from the muted actual piano sound makes playing particularly at speed difficult. I have done all kinds of tweaks to my laptop but its still quite noticeable.
One thing I did that helped quite a bit was to recalibrate the QRS so that it registered the note at letoff instead of full key bottom. I have letoff set quite close on the piano. I am looking at a different computer setup but also considered trying to regulate the QRS even higher by adding a temporary punching to the key front and recalibate the key "bottom" even higher. I can then perhaps calibrate the key velocity at the slow end so that is does not play on a very slow velocity.
Any experience of Pianoteq on a piano with an optical midi strip?
Regards.
I haven't tested it on an optical strip, no, but I suspect it's a latency issue somewhere. Are you running into an actual audio interface?
@@NickLeonard I largely solved it just now. By using the regular Windows Driver rather than ASIO, I was able to get down to a fairly low latency that works well.
On a similar vein, do you know of a good silencer mechanism for a grand that will not change the feel of the action?
@@rskuhn01 that's good. ASIO is usually the way to go, but whatever works! I don't know of a particular silencer product, but you could try just packing felt or even towels on the strings behind the dampers. That won't change the feel at all and should pretty well silence the strings. Of course there will still be mechanical noise and some resonance of the soundboard, but it'll be pretty quiet
The PianoTeq rhodes and Wurlirzer sounds like a honk of plastic! It doesn't resemble the instruments it's based upon at all.
A bit disappointing this series. I would have liked to hear more about a techs view and explanation on voicing, (hammer needling and hard / worn hammers), string length and sympathetic / resonant tones etc. Sound board options.
There are dozens of vids demoing the different models and instrument packs and effects but maybe none explaining the piano construction / design settings.
You missed a golden opportunity.
Thanks for the feedback, Peter, and you make a good point. There was so much to talk about on the plugin side, that I got caught up in that and lost some of the point of the videos. I'll plan on returning to those topics in a future video!