Best natural sounding piano VST?

Anyone knows about a good piano vst that sounds authentic and natural?

Pianoteq

neat

Yep hands down Pianoteq - bought it about 3 years ago and still the best sounding VST I own/know of.

I love Pianoteq, but not used it since version....2, I think. Are the subsequent versions worthwhile, or is it just more of the same? The main reason I used it was because it was one o the few VSTs that allowed you to use Scala tuning files.

One of the major changes between 2 and 3 was the ability to move mic positions anywhere around the piano - it definitely opened up a lot of creative potential. There was a definite jump in realism too between those two major versions. Not really noticed that much of a jump between Pianoteq 3 and 4, there's some subtle tweaks and you might be able to notice something if you did a direct a/b comparison but nothing major. I guess the support for upright piano is probably an advantage - I also like the Piano condition slider where you can slide the quality from a brand new piano to a badly conditioned out-of-tune one.

Perhaps it's time I updated my piano vst from the mda one, haha. Does this pianoteq include the sounds of the keys sliding against each other? That would be pretty nice.

I would probably go for a Kontakt Sample library, but that's just me...

Yeah but then I'd need to get Kontakt, right?

  On 10/6/2013 at 11:14 PM, modey said:

Does this pianoteq include the sounds of the keys sliding against each other? That would be pretty nice.

That's the one thing it's missing - I've actually suggested it to them in the past ! But it does have (all of which are variable) the sound of the hammers, the sound of the pedals - causing the notes to resonate or be silent if the notes are held down ( you can hear some of that here - http://www.pianoteq.com/audio/pianoteq4/kreisler-demo-05.mp3 ). Plus it's bloody tiny due to the physical modelling of everything - the full download is ~30mb

  On 10/6/2013 at 11:44 PM, modey said:

Yeah but then I'd need to get Kontakt, right?

 

Or Kontakt Player

Loving the fuck out of Pianoteq.

 

Though, I have another question now with tuning (don't really want to make new threads with simple questions)

 

Look:

 

I've set the "diapason" to 414 hz, which sounds cool. But I wish to know if there's like a "formula" or any "exact" way to tune all other instruments (well, vst in this case)? I could just do it by hearing, but I like exact things, at least in this case.

 

Like, how many -cents is 414 hz? All the instruments I have doesn't work in Hz but cents and shit like that.

 

Help!!!

Edited October 9, 2013 by logakght

Not as precise as it could be, but try the master pitch slider

Edited October 10, 2013 by ganus

  On 10/9/2013 at 7:16 PM, logakght said:

Loving the fuck out of Pianoteq.

 

Though, I have another question now with tuning (don't really want to make new threads with simple questions)

 

Look:

pianoteq tuning.jpg

 

I've set the "diapason" to 414 hz, which sounds cool. But I wish to know if there's like a "formula" or any "exact" way to tune all other instruments (well, vst in this case)? I could just do it by hearing, but I like exact things, at least in this case.

 

Like, how many -cents is 414 hz? All the instruments I have doesn't work in Hz but cents and shit like that.

 

Help!!!

 

HZ to cent (and note) converters:

 

http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/referhtml/cents-hz.html

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-centsratio.htm

 

"diapason" is a confusing term - it can mean many different but related things, so I'm not sure what that feature is in Pianoteq

 

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diapason

 

For example "Diapason normal" is the name of the French standard concert pitch.

 

Concert pitch varies too :/ (a local public radio DJ here in Austin once went off on a tangent about the history of concert pitch inflation during the 17th and 18th centuries to the present)

Edited October 10, 2013 by joshuatx

A quick question about Pianoteq (haven't got the chance to demo it yet) : do the "non-Pro" versions down-sample when working at high sample-rates like 96kHz ? I don't really get that (lack of) feature in the version comparison table.

  On 10/10/2013 at 9:23 AM, joshuatx said:

 

  On 10/9/2013 at 7:16 PM, logakght said:

Loving the fuck out of Pianoteq.

 

Though, I have another question now with tuning (don't really want to make new threads with simple questions)

 

Look:

pianoteq tuning.jpg

 

I've set the "diapason" to 414 hz, which sounds cool. But I wish to know if there's like a "formula" or any "exact" way to tune all other instruments (well, vst in this case)? I could just do it by hearing, but I like exact things, at least in this case.

 

Like, how many -cents is 414 hz? All the instruments I have doesn't work in Hz but cents and shit like that.

 

Help!!!

 

HZ to cent (and note) converters:

 

http://home.broadpark.no/~rbrekne/referhtml/cents-hz.html

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-centsratio.htm

 

"diapason" is a confusing term - it can mean many different but related things, so I'm not sure what that feature is in Pianoteq

 

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/diapason

 

For example "Diapason normal" is the name of the French standard concert pitch.

 

Concert pitch varies too :/ (a local public radio DJ here in Austin once went off on a tangent about the history of concert pitch inflation during the 17th and 18th centuries to the present)

 

beautiful. thanks!

  On 10/10/2013 at 2:18 PM, lin said:

A quick question about Pianoteq (haven't got the chance to demo it yet) : do the "non-Pro" versions down-sample when working at high sample-rates like 96kHz ? I don't really get that (lack of) feature in the version comparison table.

I think it works at whatever your soundcard can handle - I've just checked my copy of Pianoteq 4 (Standard) and in the Sample Rate section is goes up to 96kHz. I think that 192Khz internal calculation on the pro version is for funky internal calculations and then 'downsamples' to the max that your soundcard is outputting at.

I use the stock ones in reason and ableton. Reason sounds better, but I tend to embrace the difference between acoustic instruments and their digital facsimiles. But I also have had intermittent periods of regular access to uprights and grands over the years, so I can understand the desire.

 

If you are so serious about piano that you need your vst to allot for hundreds of combinations of mic arrangements, then you might need to rethink things. Hyper-sampling is great and all, but I personally don't need it.

  On 10/11/2013 at 1:06 AM, sheatheman said:

If you are so serious about piano that you need your vst to allot for hundreds of combinations of mic arrangements, then you might need to rethink things. Hyper-sampling is great and all, but I personally don't need it.

Another benefit of Pianoteq - It allows a near infinite amount of mic arrangements (upto 5 simultaneously, each at their own X Y & Z position relative to the Piano), how much the lid is open, the size of the piano. Good ol' physical modelling innit !

  On 10/11/2013 at 1:06 AM, sheatheman said:

Hyper-sampling is great and all, but I personally don't need it.

and most of the world doesn't seem to need it either as far as I'm concerned.

 

physical modeling is the future, even when storage becomes super cheap and lightning speed hyper sampling libraries will be a thing of the past.

am i correct in saying that close to realistic physical modeling is still nearly impossible with mainstream processing power?

no. There are many already existing close to and very convincing physical modeling plugins out there for PC and Mac. A lot of them require a 'sweet spot' setting or some subtle automation to get them to sound totally convincing. I would say only a few like Pianoteq actually sound 'real' out of the box. Pianoteq changes the whole game as far as i'm concerned. Im really excited to see big companies seizing on this technology and trying to end the whole 100gig sampling library thing for good.

My problem with sampling libraries in general is while some of them sound amazing and have hundreds of different articulations, none of them ever seemed to implement any random or chaos aspect that's always found in acoustic instruments. Physical modeling is very good for this 'natural' aspect. Of how blowing into a reed is going to sound different every single time you do it, not just sound different based on how hard you do it. Physical modeling in some respects, at least good engines have very sophisticated noise and feedback algorithms designed to emulate this real world chaos that gives real instruments such interesting and expressive timbres

as current PC x86 technology and processor speeds are concerned, the 2 most impressive hardware physical modeling synths, the Korg Wavedrum and Yamaha Vl1 (or even vp1) can most likely run with room to spare in a software environment. Those algorithms were concocted back in the mid 90s, and much like any other DSP algorithm from that era that wouldn't run on a computer of that time, will easily run now.

edit: and just for clarification sake, it's not how much processing power you have that determines the realism of a physical model necessarily. It helps, but Tension for example in abelton live, can sound extremely fucking realistic (listen to Oval's new music) and it seems to eat up a very small amount of CPU.

Edited October 19, 2013 by John Ehrlichman

Yeah Pianoteq is really pretty light on resources too. Whilst we're on the whole talk of physical modelling, another purchase I'm quite happy with is Chromaphone, which does really good percussive modelling (I guess it's pretty similar to Ableton's Collision though I didn't have Ableton Studio at the time)-

 

http://s3.amazonaws.com/aas_sound/Chromaphone/ThiagoPinhero-Chromafrica.mp3

(100% made using the VSTi)

 

http://www.applied-acoustics.com/chromaphone/overview/

Collision is similar to some of Tassman's modeling. Chromaphone sounds a lot better than mostly anything I've heard for straight non tonal percussion imo. And I'm going to give a shout out to tension again because as far as a physical modeling engine is concerned it is an entirely different beast than Collision. mcbpete, i know one of these days you'll be playing with it and realize that is how Oval is making his new stuff

Aye I feel like I've wasted quite a bit of cash by buying the fullest possible version of Ableton and yet am using virtually none of the instruments that come with it. I feel like I bought too much in one go and am slowly piecing together Ableton, all the instruments with studio version, the full Max 6, and Gen (and vvvvv, though now I have Jitter I probably don't need to worry 'bout that)