Originally Posted By: DAW Monkey


......the best free tools I've found (I'm not going to invest in anything that won't play a realistic piano), it always comes down to sounding, in part, like a toy piano, best I've found like a toy with some notes in the mid to upper registers, most of the keys sounding alright, but not all: it's like somebody inserted a Casio electric piano for some keys on an acoustic grand, so-called

Bottom line. Is there a product that will play a very explicit piano score, without having to turn those annoying little knobs for a week and still have it sound like some of the strings are broken and laying on adjacent? Anything out of the box that sounds civilized and works, without an act of Congress, for retards like me? Is it you just get what you pay for, and, if so, pay for what product that works, as such, then, short of thousands going to East West? Or do you simply have to spend half your time tweaking knobs, instead of scoring, which is just a frustrating time pit, to my mind?

Thank you very much, sincerely, for any advice.


In full disclosure.... I did not read every reply or comment in full.... so this may have been answered..... or not.

Free tools and cheap midi patches will sound like a "casio" no matter how well it's played.

In short, you do tend to get what you pay for when it comes to sounds.

Midi these days has 2 general ways to make sounds. First is synth patches. These are not real instruments but someone's attempt to make a set of oscillators sound like a piano. Most are pretty cheesy and can be spotted almost instantly. They sound "midi" as I like to say. And yeah, in the basic synths where they exist, they are called things like "Grand Acoustic Piano" and other grossly misleading names.

Then there is the world of Sampled sounds. Samples are the real pianos...Steinburgs, Bosendorfs, and other classic pianos from around the world's concert halls and studios, recorded in professional situations, with the best engineers and mics. Samples can vary from reasonably good up to "jaw droppingly amazing" Price determines which end of the spectrum into which they fall. Practically all the samples sound 100% better than the patches. I stopped using patched synths a long time ago. Even a "cheap" sample can go a long way towards a convincing performance. The higher priced and better sounding samples have many layers recorded and have a wider range of expression.

Getting the midi to articulate. We all know that articulation of the instrument.... how the artist plays, touch... hard or soft, delay or pushing the note, use of pedals and so many more things go into the human aspect that makes the world of difference between a performance that sounds static and dull, with every note being perfectly in time and the same volume and attack level to one that has the articulations and variations that a human player delivers. Taking a top quality sample and playing it in a simple midi manner will make that performance sound mechanical and fake.

Copying a midi pattern to a song using software will deliver, in most cases, a very boring, although, accurate, version of the song. One would have to go through the song, note by note, to properly articulate the performance. Not impossible... but time consuming and tedious work. Assuming one understands how to do it correctly in the first place, because if it's not done right, it will be worse than not doing it at all.

The best method of getting proper articulation into a piano performance is to actually "play it in" using a midi piano keyboard that sends all of the articulation data. You need a touch sensitive keyboard and a DAW that can read it all and record it. Many of the cheaper keyboards are not touch sensitive and would not work well for doing that.

All that said.... for piano sounds, I use Cakewalk's Music Creator DAW which came with a synth called the Cakewalk Sound Center and I bought the $20 Steinburg Piano's add on pack. I think they are migrating to Sonar Home Studio now and phasing MC out but it's still available for $50 or so. I also have Kontakt from Native instruments. A bit more costly than MC but it's professional quality stuff. They have a few nice sounding pianos in the basic lineup. Lots of 3rd party sounds are available for Kontakt. A friend has Ivory Piano's. Those are some nice sounding piano samples. If I was strictly a piano player, I'd probably have Ivory in my DAW. For my purposes, MC and Kontakt are sufficient to give me what I need.

So yeah, you can get what you're looking for. It's doubtful you will find it for free.

SO..... I don't consider myself a piano player. I prefer guitar. So when I need a really good piano part, I turn to the Piano real tracks that PG has in BB/RB. You have the human factor complete with articulations built in and ready to go. Unfortunately, it won't, at this time, play a midi score for you. It will play the chords and key, to provide a nice back up track for a song. For my purposes, it works exceptionally well, but I'm not asking it to do scores. For your purposes, perhaps you do need scores played accurately.

The problem you face has 2 components. One is to get a realistic piano sound that can be articulated. I have answered that. The second part of the problem is to get a program that will articulate a score for you in some sort of automated way that results in a natural sound and feel. That's the part that I don't know if that kind of software exists or if it does, how costly it might be. The problem I see with articulating software is that the articulations on each song would vary and also on the same song from player to player..... a very difficult task to accomplish in a manner that sounds natural and pleasing to the listeners.

Hopefully this is helpful to you.

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www.herbhartley.com
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