help. my piano sounds fake
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Posted on May 01, 2004 04:36 pm
fortymile
Member Since: Jan 18, 2003
does anyone have a piano frequency resource
im shooting for a big murky radiohead sound but these triton samples suck. all the pianos are like toys and i need to do some serious tweaking. but i might be expecting too much. the waveforms of the pianos sound so simple that there may be no EQ trick that'll do what i want.
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May 01, 2004 05:54 pm I've just recorded a piano based track with the PSP Piano Verb plug in...it's taken a GM Piano and transformed it to something into the stratosphere (compared to what it was).
The verb is excellent on this plugin (tho I am not sure how you're doing your piano). It has 5 settings including a darker sounding piano - simply the best piano plugin Ive found for this type of thing..kinda spaces it right out and makes it "real"!
I tend to do it all in MIDI using the std internal sounds, mix to audio then verb em!
Dont know if this helps much tho but you can hear the affects on my latest track "America" (which you've kindly posted on).
Cheers and I hope this helps...
Coco.
May 01, 2004 08:53 pm thanks coco. the effects on the piano in america sound real good, but i can still tell that it's a modeled piano. don't take that wrong, i think it sounds great in your song, especially because the playing is so measured and even, and because the vocals are so good (they kind of seem like the centerpiece.) but i want to get far away from midi sounds because--seeing as how i play a real piano whenever i can--i get real picky and can always hear the difference. if i would live-mic anything in a mix, it would be piano, just because there's no substitute for a real one, in my view. nevertheless, some keyboards come pretty close. the korg, unfortunately, is closer to old skool toy casios.
i wonder how your song america would sound if it were played on a grand in a strange room. if you ever run across such a piano, i would definitely try it! maybe just bring an mp3 and headphones and play along while recording into some other device, then mix the new track into the old. you could maybe go check out an empty church or something.
just an idea. i've always wanted to do that with a song that is mainly piano.
May 02, 2004 04:03 am I know mine sound real good on the s90 i just can't record yet (see other post) otherwise you could have sent me the midi and I'dd run it through the s90
Greets Presley
May 02, 2004 04:40 am Its a great idea...I take it the right way too!
I am considering getting a keyboard to see if I can improve on the piano sounds I am getting.
Im also looking at piano VST's...measure up and see whats best.
However, the majority of my songs will be gtr/bass/drums. I just have the "luxury" of piano due to using the pc..I do take your point tho - I wish I did have a grand piano!!
Good luck with your own piano sound quest tho..
Coco.
riffgodwww.charlienaebeck.comMember
Since: Apr 10, 2004
May 02, 2004 08:23 am Hey fortymile,
Sounds like you have VST capabilities there if I am reading right this early in the morning. haha I might suggest if you can find the plugin for Garritan Personal Orchestra that you might dig it. I just recently got hold of it myself and was blown away by the piano sounds and all the other instrument tones they got in there. I think that there are some samples that were used with it on a guys site I ran into originally when I heard about it. If I remember right the site is: stark.lepotorks.net If not, search for Stark Music online and you'll find his site. He's got a lot of music composition stuff on there for movies and what not. Goodluck
May 02, 2004 01:34 pm the site is now starkaudio.com. thanks!
the garritan page..wow. that steinway grand sounds pretty good! i'm going to check this thing out.
riffgodwww.charlienaebeck.comMember
Since: Apr 10, 2004
May 05, 2004 06:59 am no prob. :) yeah, I am still going through all the sounds on the cd's myself, but I cannot believe the quality they got out of the sound for being VST's let me know how it turns out if you hook up with Garritan.
May 05, 2004 07:33 am BTW forty
I got it up and running so if I want
you could send me the midi file and I'll run it through a couple of piano sounds or something
Greets
Presley
May 05, 2004 01:50 pm I have a Kurzweil K2500RS with the piano rom, a Steinway B sample from Sweetwater, an Alesis QSR, a Roland GS64 and a Yamaha P80. If you want to hear samples of these, I'd be happy to make a recording too. Check out this website too:
www.purgatorycreek.com/pianocompare.html
May 05, 2004 04:09 pm well thanks guys. thanks a bunch. i can only afford cheap stuff, although i might be able to swing the garritan this month if i like the sounds enough. once the piano part has been worked out, i might take you up on your offer presley. thanks.
compsem--thats a cool resource there, thank you. i just listened to a wide variety of those samples. maybe its just me, but do they all sound a tad false? i long for the day that a real piano can be pretty much duplicated. i'll check these out a bit more.
May 05, 2004 04:23 pm I agree, digital pianos sound a bit false, even expensive stuff. But the good thing is, digitals don't need to be tuned and don't change tuning with the weather or bumping them around. I can get a far superior sound recording with my digitals than with my real pianos (2 Mason & Hamlins). I'd have to have some really good mics to compete with the recording quality of the digitals. Here's how the Steinway B samples sound on the Kurzweil:
www.threestrands.com/MP3/NearMe.mp3
I hear that the Giga Studio piano samples are extremely nice too.
MauzgrrrrrrrMember
Since: Mar 29, 2004
May 06, 2004 04:25 am Sounds pretty good. But sometimes maybe its just those mistakes and quirks associated with the slightly imperfect tuning and the way in which the character of the pianist comes over with real keys that makes the difference.
May 06, 2004 11:21 am When I actually play the piano, there's plenty of mistakes and quirks! I would love to find a way, without a great deal of effort, to humanize tracks. Almost everything I do is moused in under Cakewalk. I've tried some stuff in the past, but it never felt right. The closest I've come is to slide the timing around note-by-note to create the little anticipations and latencies that appear in real playing. I suppose I should just practice more.
May 06, 2004 12:17 pm There is also velocity and aftertouch settings you can change to make things sound just slightly softer and change the durations by little tweaks...
May 06, 2004 01:11 pm wow compsem i like that piece! i wish i was at that level. did you write this?
youre right...this digital piano doesnt sound as bad as i'm making out the others to be. you can tell sometimes on the high notes--all digital pianos seem to me to have some natural problem with the attack being too hard and falling away wrong. but digital piano in the bass usually sounds pretty real.
by the way, since you're classically trained...do you have any music books you're very fond of that you might recommend? theory books, i mean, as i'm rather poor at sight-reading. although, in the realm of actual playing skills, my left hand needs a ton of work! need some new pattern ideas...
May 06, 2004 01:28 pm Hi Forty, thanks! Yeah, that's my composition. I think the Steinway B samples sound very good for that classical piano style, but for pop music, especially rock, it's a bit too tame. What would you like to know about theory? Or what would you like theory to do for you?
May 06, 2004 04:57 pm i think i was just looking for a new theory book to read. modal harmony is where my main interest is right now. it can be hard to get a good recommendation for that specific area. but you might know textbooks or something that focus on that at least for a section or two?
but my main prob with piano is that my left hand needs a lot of work, but i'm pretty uncoordinated and any left hand section i would write and commit to memmory would i think necessarily have to be kind of repetetive. on the one hand, that bothers me. its not organic or very natural and i'm simply too uncoordinated to really do it. of course, in rock, you can use fifth chords, triads, or repetetive basslines in the left hand and it'll sound alright (especially if the keyboard is just a small part of the mix). but to really get better at piano i feel i need a bunch more "tricks" in the bag about what to do with the left hand. but not tricks. its hard to explain. a better understanding of what is possible down there.
do you know yann tiersen? the guy who composed the soundtrack to amelie? i think he's kind of a good intermediate person to study in that he seems to be using a lot of repetetive arpeggios in the left hand, but with occasional embellishments.
i really enjoyed the composition. i'll check out your other stuff a bit later.
DanMember
Since: Nov 21, 2002
May 06, 2004 05:10 pm I'll ask my friend Dave next time i see him, he'll definitely know what theory books to recommend, He recommended a few books to me in the past, good guy.
He has a Doctorate in music composition, he showed me some of the really advanced theory books... like "Advanced Atonal Theory" and stuff like that... It looks more like a complicated math textbook than a music book. I didnt think there was much theory behind atonality lol. crazyiness
May 06, 2004 05:51 pm haha cool ... thanks
May 08, 2004 01:51 pm hey thanks, compsem.
i've seen some of these sites before, but some are new to me. i'll be checking these out.
gracias
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
May 14, 2004 07:58 pm forty, in the links section under freeware there are a couple of good piano softsynths. I forget the names rightnow but I know I have used them and they sound great.
May 14, 2004 11:22 pm nice, ill check 'em
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
May 15, 2004 09:59 pm Hey forty, just my humble opinion. I have tried all the piano samples and synths out there. I always used a very beutiful Bosendorfer sample in SampleCell which is a wonderfull sampler pity it is on an old legacy ISA card and it will only run on up to windows Me or I would have it in this box. Anyway it was a huge sample set up 32meg. Nice stereo with the fullest veloctiy respnse set up of any I have used. I have tried a newer software version of the same Bosendorfer samples used for that set up and it rocks. Not cheap by any means, but way cheaper then a Bosey. If you are unfamilier with the sound of the Bosey give a listen to Tory Amos stuff as that is all she will play. They are the primo Rock piano in my book. They have a huge sound, not saying Steinway doesnt but a Bosey is just a richer fuller sound.
