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#402403 03/24/17 05:49 AM
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First, hi all. I'm new here and may be stupid about midi, so please bear with me, or insult me is okay, but, if one of you experts could graciously summarize the validity of my thoughts, that would be much appreciate, as I'm in a quandary. Here's the situation, as brief as possible.

I compose music, am all about getting it on paper, and I'm mystified about all the midi complexity, the conversations about attack this, velocity or decay that, on and on. This is with getting realistic midi playback in mind. So, let's take an acoustic piano.

In a score, you have notes, a time signature, dynamics, phrasing and pedal markings, etc. But limited etc. From a score, a pianist sits down and plays what's on paper, which doesn't involve fifty parameters for every staff: you hit the notes at a certain speed, at varying volumes, some phrasing and pedal. I have all that in a score, export it to midi, load it up and, 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, anyway. And the demo of a few products that brag a lot sounds great, but I know I turned every little knob every which way and nothing quite that good! Sometimes, of course, the demo is in registers more friendly to realistic sound for the instruments. I don't trust online product demos, as some engineer at the company could have tweaked it out the wazoo for a week, for all I know, which I don't want to have to do. I do trust the very expensive products, like East West, deliver, but I'm not a millionaire and would be content with almost fooling somebody: just not, at best, a toy piano some notes, or a piano that, is if, is rattling in a cave, or sounding like the instrument is covered with a big cardboard box, when things get pianissimo.

That's the situation. Now we have Garritan and Miroslav that are affordable, but do even these get past the toy piano? Most important, is there a product, at all, that just plays your score, created in Finale or Sibelius, good notation programs? I have to believe, please correct me if I'm wrong, my notation products can export notes' exactly notated durations at their tempos, dynamics, phrasing and the pedal. A performer doesn't have to bend a velocity curve or twang up or down the reverb, confabulate the equalized echo or pan what comes from each hand (sorry for the tongue-in-cheek, but I seriously don't know what I'm talking about, turn DAW knobs like a monkey, hoping one of them delivers something different, most of them just making things worse, and I did admit to being stupid, so have some pity...).

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.

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Welcome to the forum.

I don't play keyboards and am not the one to answer your question, but I wanted you to know I understand the question perfectly. I've used East West (last time was about 15 years ago), Garritan, and some other less expensive VSTis (virtual instruments). I've also used many of the dedicated notation programs. You are correct about product demos. Interestingly, since you are on a PG Music forum, you might be interested that this company does not doctor the demos. They record straight out of the program.

Several fellow users here do know a lot about getting good piano sounds. Give it some time for them to find this thread. I don't know either how much 'tweaking' they have to do.

As a composer, I don't have time to adjust much more than select a piano, set the reverb (low), set the tone, and play it. But I can understand how a pianist would be more sensitive. Several times here we have discovered that musicians care deeply about how their own instrument sounds when reproduced electronically, but care less so for other instruments. For example, all electronic brass and woodwinds irritate me, but I can accept some piano, drums, and bass "out of the box".


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Hi, Matt! Much appreciate your reply, as it's prescient and spot on, though not encouraging, as I feared. You do very much get the dilemma!

I did look around a lot, read conversations all over the place about tweaking, and will look around more here, as time permits, but there is that which is, perhaps, an unrealistic goal of avoiding having to be a sound engineer. And I am mystified what's on the page is not that complex, as alluded to, a plethora of electronic parameters not cognized by a performer, that it doesn't seem some things should need post-processing by the user, with the score that is simple and explicit, the instrument what it is, but they can't really put that instrument in an homogenous electronic box, short of thousands in software, or, for all I know, hardware, too? Empathize with woodwinds that can be the pits, also.

Thank you much for the welcome and answer that reflects a reality it's enlightening you also see, from a standpoint of, surely, more experience.

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By the way, Matt, I'm not even that sensitive. I'm just looking for something that makes a normal score sound like a decent piano, on all 88, without having to deal with differential equations! I mean, seriously, everything I've tried, you've got to put a monkey on top of the lid and a crank on the side of that VSTi piano, for what these programs are doing to my scores, which are correct. Really, I'll even eat food I don't as much like, but am gagging on midi pianos.

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You are the first person I've heard who made a major point about the difference in the piano sound in different registers. Timbre? Usually, it's a love or hate for the whole 88.

You mentioned hardware. I don't use any VSTis. I have used Roland hardware forever (over 20 years?) to reproduce my MIDI sounds. Currently I have an Integra-7 with what they call Supernatural sounds. The grand sounds pretty good to me, but I admit, I'm producing composer demos to send to my band, and the sound quality is not that critical.

I'm going to shoot a message to John Ford to look at your post.


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I’ve found a couple products that demo so well for the companies, did the trial, with no such “joy in Mudville.” And I had turned little knobs to carpal tunnel fears! But some products do certain registers beautifully, then go schizoid around F4 or whatever: twang. I’ll keep going on about the warts until you all hang yourselves, so will spare you the whole list of grievous experiences, like the notes that are really loud in their program, though equal velocity. And again, you may not believe it, but I’m not being sensitive. Listen to a piano, then listen to the computer output to that sliced bread VSTi demo of the product you just downloaded to try, use the best stereo on earth if you want (you can hear it’s junk on a builtin laptop speaker, though): they don’t sound close. All I’m talking about is lay ears fooled, as opposed to movie sound engineer, or nearly fooled, in the main being able to say, “That sounds like a piano” on all the keys, and not spending hours turning little knobs for a long list of things that don’t exist in notation. Or put it this way, can nobody come up with, say, a preset that makes it sound like a real instrument, then? Why do you have to start with a grind organ and fiddle around? I don’t build my own piano, either.

Thank you loads for your help and forwarding information. Bless you! In the end, I’d just like somebody to, at least, say, “You’re right. That is, screwed.” Or maybe there is something out of the box, that doesn’t require terabytes of East West add-ons and a supercomputer?

By the way, you have good taste, that is, Roland. Not as much an electronic person, Roland has always seemed the cream of the crop, and there is a Roland I think it’s called 1080 sampled product that’s superior to others in one of my programs. They have a nice set of sounds for utility purposes, as you mention. But the software product is, alas, a ways from an acoustic piano.

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You mention playing a piano versus doing an electronic rendition of it. Well, the human body is a marvelous thing and is able to do things physically at the speed of your brain.
But with a computer, at some level, you have to tell it how to do everything. But if you are tweaking knobs from one end to the other, then that's not going to get you anywhere, either. Your computer speakers are not going to faithfully produce the sound an acoustic piano makes in a room without you having to "tell" it what the reverb looks like, or how far away from the piano you are, or whether the lid is open or closed or somewhere in between. Perfectly tuned MIDI piano will never faithfully reproduce the overtones that occur when strings on a piano are vibrating and the sound is hitting the sound board and reflecting from the walls. You have to tell the computer how to do those things.

And I'm pretty sure you could get Billy Joel, Elton John, Peter Nero, Ferrante and Teicher, Alicia Keys, Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, etc, etc together to all play the same song on the exact same piano, and every one of them will sound differently.

Remember, MIDI basically only does the following things: it plays a note for a certain duration at a certain velocity (how hard you hit the note) which gets translated into the volume. There is also natural note decay to consider with the other things I've mentioned.

So let us know which piano products you have already considered and discarded and maybe we can help with whatever is left, or just realize that your hearing may be more sensitive than you yourself believe. Also, let us know what kind of music are you trying to re-create.


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Thanks John.

DM, don't spare us; as John said, if we know what you've tried and what you think about those, we have a better starting point.

It also is assumed that you have good ears, good listening equipment, and a good room for sound, or else this search is all for nothing.


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Welcome to the forum.

I am a guitarist/bassist not a pianist but JonD is my keyboard player. I have a number of piano VSTis but we using them in songs. This is totally different than a solo piano where the piano must sound as realistic as possible.

Maybe this 3-page thread will help:2

http://homerecording.com/bbs/equipment-forums/midi-mania/best-piano-vst-instrument-189406/

Google/bing piano vsti and you will find them from free to expensive. But
IMHO to get a somewhat realistic piano VSTi you will have to spend some money. I say that because MIDI can fool an audience but it but it has to be a very good VSTi and played by someone who is knowledgeable about that instrument to fool a musician that plays that instrument. That is what you are finding out.

I also play a wind controller and I have some great sax sounds from samplemodeling and some excellent flute sounds from various companies. I have fooled a number of people using these sounds but I have never fooled a sax or flute player.

Good luck.

{edit} John and I were typing at the same time. He brings up a very valuable point. You must have good speaker monitors. Near field monitors with as flat a response as possible are the best.


Last edited by MarioD; 03/24/17 09:38 AM.

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DM,

I'm a keyboard player. John and Matt's advice above is excellent.

As John points out, with MIDI it's necessary to tell your computer how to do everything. Unfortunately, it doesn't interpret a person's thinking.

If you use notation software to generate your scores, that will help contribute to the overall sound coming across as 'mechanical' and not 'human'.

  • Scoring programs will notate each note with equal velocity and percentage duration and, in addition, each note is exactly placed on the correct beat or part of a beat. When a person plays piano, the above is varied greatly... not every note is 100% accurately placed nor played identically - velocities vary greatly depending on what finger played what note and how phrases are shaped; length of notes also vary. The starting place to getting the best piano sound is to electronically record a MIDI performance. All the nuances of human playing are then recorded as MIDI information. (Playing technique contributes greatly to realism. Notation software does not have that skill.)

If you want to see what I mean, generate a MIDI Supertrack in BIAB and then have a look at the piano roll for that track. These tracks are created from live performances of top musicians and recorded as MIDI.

I haven't used MIDI piano a great deal over the years. Recently, though, I wrote a song that used a MIDI Supertrack piano as the primary backing instrument. Here's a link to that song.

https://soundcloud.com/noel-adams/this-road

I used two inexpensive softsynths playing the same piano part. Details about that setup can be found at the below link.

This Road ... BIAB setup

I don't know if the piano sound I created fits your idea of a 'good' piano sound but I think it sounds reasonable.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Noel


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Thank you all very much for the good advice. I’d tried products like Pianoteq, a few VSTs with excellent demos on VST Planet, some Japanese super piano, according to everybody I forget the name of, Garritan, a list of other sampled pianos out there that sound just great, demo wise, futilely turned enough knobs for one lifetime.

I believe I have an answer, though, after reading some good posts here, mainly the unanswered aspects verified. I did some searches on playing notation and believe came upon the crux of the biscuit: notation midi data is too basic. I had been wondering what on earth do people want all these midi products to plug an acoustic keyboard sound into, unless wanting a portable grand piano(s) or grand on the cheap, creating performances sounding some exotic acoustic piano from an electric keyboard? Don't get me wrong, great if you like that, but no cake icing for the composer of notes on a page. I thought a lot of demos online came from notation. Nope, I'm beginning to see. And you don’t need anything exotic doing midi input. But what I do is notation, and step-wise if by keyboard at all. From my perspective, I’d like to turn the notation into a realistic performance of the notation and this is a possible concept, but technology is not there yet, or should say not so appropriated on the consumer market? There are excuses made as to why a key sounds like a guitar, because people have different touch, but would beg the differ. One can strike a key any possible way, and it will sound like a real piano note, on a real piano. But from reading some new research, that midi file your notation produces does on/off type stuff, instead of producing, say, the data from a weighted electronic key with respect to velocity, this the huge difference. Same with, say, the pedal, on and off notation midi, in an arc of motion with data in-between, as an electronic pedal is “read” by the simulating software. Dynamic markings suddenly turned on and off in that Neanderthal notation midi export.

What it boils down to is there is no respect for the old fashioned composer, who does a bunch of notes and all the information for a performer to perform, right there on paper, and that performer could live one’s whole life performing without thinking to need to pan flange the reverb in an attenuated echo spliced attacked of the sustain pedal, when mid measure of a legato phrase, especially in the C4 octave. (Yes, I made that up, only know enough about the knobs to now hate them. Sorry.)

So my new hypothesis? Nothing out there plays a notation midi export worth a hill of beans, for lack of data nuances. Please do correct if I’m wrong, and I’ll delay my suicide.

Just kidding. Really, thank you all very much, but I’m fearing notation just will not play in Peoria, as it were. Period. Anyway, you guys are smart!

Last edited by DAW Monkey; 03/24/17 11:43 AM.
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Originally Posted By: Noel96
DM,

I'm a keyboard player. John and Matt's advice above is excellent.

As John points out, with MIDI it's necessary to tell your computer how to do everything. Unfortunately, it doesn't interpret a person's thinking.

If you use notation software to generate your scores, that will help contribute to the overall sound coming across as 'mechanical' and not 'human'.

  • Scoring programs will notate each note with equal velocity and percentage duration and, in addition, each note is exactly placed on the correct beat or part of a beat. When a person plays piano, the above is varied greatly... not every note is 100% accurately placed nor played identically - velocities vary greatly depending on what finger played what note and how phrases are shaped; length of notes also vary. The starting place to getting the best piano sound is to electronically record a MIDI performance. All the nuances of human playing are then recorded as MIDI information. (Playing technique contributes greatly to realism. Notation software does not have that skill.)

If you want to see what I mean, generate a MIDI Supertrack in BIAB and then have a look at the piano roll for that track. These tracks are created from live performances of top musicians and recorded as MIDI.

I haven't used MIDI piano a great deal over the years. Recently, though, I wrote a song that used a MIDI Supertrack piano as the primary backing instrument. Here's a link to that song.

https://soundcloud.com/noel-adams/this-road

I used two inexpensive softsynths playing the same piano part. Details about that setup can be found at the below link.

This Road ... BIAB setup

I don't know if the piano sound I created fits your idea of a 'good' piano sound but I think it sounds reasonable.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Noel


No, that's just great sound, and nice work! As in the previous post, I've been wanting to make notation perform, not anything recorded or even produced on an electronic weighted keyboard, in the case of piano. I fear that's a non-starter, for reasons mentioned.

But thank you all, guys, and God bless!

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Originally Posted By: jford
You mention playing a piano versus doing an electronic rendition of it. Well, the human body is a marvelous thing and is able to do things physically at the speed of your brain.
But with a computer, at some level, you have to tell it how to do everything. But if you are tweaking knobs from one end to the other, then that's not going to get you anywhere, either. Your computer speakers are not going to faithfully produce the sound an acoustic piano makes in a room without you having to "tell" it what the reverb looks like, or how far away from the piano you are, or whether the lid is open or closed or somewhere in between. Perfectly tuned MIDI piano will never faithfully reproduce the overtones that occur when strings on a piano are vibrating and the sound is hitting the sound board and reflecting from the walls. You have to tell the computer how to do those things.

And I'm pretty sure you could get Billy Joel, Elton John, Peter Nero, Ferrante and Teicher, Alicia Keys, Ray Charles, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, etc, etc together to all play the same song on the exact same piano, and every one of them will sound differently.

Remember, MIDI basically only does the following things: it plays a note for a certain duration at a certain velocity (how hard you hit the note) which gets translated into the volume. There is also natural note decay to consider with the other things I've mentioned.

So let us know which piano products you have already considered and discarded and maybe we can help with whatever is left, or just realize that your hearing may be more sensitive than you yourself believe. Also, let us know what kind of music are you trying to re-create.


Thank you for the very informative reply. I suppose what I was thinking is that your list of people, that omitted Freddy Kempf, by the way, that none would play that piece and sound like an organ grinder, except maybe... No, I won't say that. The drug and booze binges were a long time ago.

Sadly, your statement "Remember, MIDI basically only does the following things: it plays a note for a certain duration at a certain velocity (how hard you hit the note) which gets translated into the volume. There is also natural note decay to consider with the other things I've mentioned" is something I learned the hard way, should have posted here first. Yes, just learned notation midi is basic to the rotten core.

Thank you much. Wish I'd come here sometime ago, where a "don't know nothin'" can find some people that know, and aren't trying to sell something that won't work, anyway!

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Originally Posted By: MarioD
Welcome to the forum.

I am a guitarist/bassist not a pianist but JonD is my keyboard player. I have a number of piano VSTis but we using them in songs. This is totally different than a solo piano where the piano must sound as realistic as possible.

Maybe this 3-page thread will help:2

http://homerecording.com/bbs/equipment-forums/midi-mania/best-piano-vst-instrument-189406/

Google/bing piano vsti and you will find them from free to expensive. But
IMHO to get a somewhat realistic piano VSTi you will have to spend some money. I say that because MIDI can fool an audience but it but it has to be a very good VSTi and played by someone who is knowledgeable about that instrument to fool a musician that plays that instrument. That is what you are finding out.

I also play a wind controller and I have some great sax sounds from samplemodeling and some excellent flute sounds from various companies. I have fooled a number of people using these sounds but I have never fooled a sax or flute player.

Good luck.

{edit} John and I were typing at the same time. He brings up a very valuable point. You must have good speaker monitors. Near field monitors with as flat a response as possible are the best.



I fear I didn't well explain I was thinking VST plugged into notation sort of thing, the problem not the VST as used with an electrically rich input device. Nor did I even have those bearings quite straight, earlier.

But flutes and sax? Cool! A couple instruments that can really make a work and performance. I wish my notation programs knew anything, at this point, about being a controller, short of something silly like manually giving individual notes velocities. It's sort of sad, but you can score things you can't play, and in your brain is no substitute.

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I wouldn't say it's rotten to the core, and there has been a lot of technology over the years to make it better (and you can get pretty close with high end solutions). And I boiled it down to its simplest, but you get the point.

And remember, MIDI isn't just there to play piano. It's designed to provide a reasonable representation of any instrument out there; however, it pretty much uses the same rubric for all of them, when in fact every instrument is different.

Interestingly, from the listener point of view, the most vocal critics seem to be from folks who criticize the sounds of their own instruments.

But if you are looking to get a good performance from notation, then unless you are using a MIDI rendering engine that provides humanization capability (and that may not be the way "you would have done it"), you are going to get every note on the exact division you wrote it.

Here's a good test. Play a song on the piano (even using a metronome to keep yourself in time), and then look at the result. You will find very few of your notes land on the beat divisions. They might be off by 1/64th, 1/32nd, maybe even 1/16th. If you look at the result in notation view, it looks like someone just splattered black paint dots across the page.

I don't know if there is a free trial version (you should check), but you might want to try Native Instrument's Kontakt Instrument called Alicia's Keys. It's $99 to buy and works with the free Kontakt player, but you don't get all the bells and whistles then like you do with the full Kontakt player.

You might also want to take a look at True Pianos.

But again, the "performance" of the MIDI has to be right for it to sound right and that's the hard work part of it. No short cuts.


John

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Originally Posted By: jford
I wouldn't say it's rotten to the core, and there has been a lot of technology over the years to make it better (and you can get pretty close with high end solutions). And I boiled it down to its simplest, but you get the point.

And remember, MIDI isn't just there to play piano. It's designed to provide a reasonable representation of any instrument out there; however, it pretty much uses the same rubric for all of them, when in fact every instrument is different.

Interestingly, from the listener point of view, the most vocal critics seem to be from folks who criticize the sounds of their own instruments.

But if you are looking to get a good performance from notation, then unless you are using a MIDI rendering engine that provides humanization capability (and that may not be the way "you would have done it"), you are going to get every note on the exact division you wrote it.

Here's a good test. Play a song on the piano (even using a metronome to keep yourself in time), and then look at the result. You will find very few of your notes land on the beat divisions. They might be off by 1/64th, 1/32nd, maybe even 1/16th. If you look at the result in notation view, it looks like someone just splattered black paint dots across the page.

I don't know if there is a free trial version (you should check), but you might want to try Native Instrument's Kontakt Instrument called Alicia's Keys. It's $99 to buy and works with the free Kontakt player, but you don't get all the bells and whistles then like you do with the full Kontakt player.

You might also want to take a look at True Pianos.

But again, the "performance" of the MIDI has to be right for it to sound right and that's the hard work part of it. No short cuts.


It's not the sounds of the VSTs and such I'm criticizing, as mentioned, demos sound fantastic. My issue is I can't get that from a notation export, and nobody, but nobody, has been able to tell me all this time that isn't going to happen, rather "buy Miroslav" and the like, and you'll get a realistic performance. It's not going to happen from notation, I now realize.

For my purposes, I disable humanizing aspects when doing notation, seldom actually copy anything into a score played. I made a mistake doing this sometime ago, in fact, the playback sounded correct, the notation WRONG! I was aghast I had to redo a couple passages, because the humanizing stuff my lazy rear had pasted from this new software, for instance, gave a note 1.69 duration on playback, only, and I'd never tried the unmolested playback. I had no idea this was happening. Interesting the program, bottom line, "knew" what I played, but did not notate it right, and there are no 1.69 longer notes coming from my fingers, which the software actually notated with an entirely wrong beat I never once played. Again, the program "heard" what I hear, and, also, I do play evenly such as the work I was working on at that time. I manually notated the passage correctly, to sound as it did humanized, which the application botched the notation of. At that time I also had a latency bugaboo to deal with, had to slow things down too much, didn't even find the live input worth it, for having to manually clean it up, haven't needed the humanzing stuff before, anyway. I have never since allowed such played notes to "touch" a score, that they don't play as intended, humanized off. Tell you what, it's major medical, when a passage is botched in the middle, if you don't luck into an acceptable new boundary with the concatenated measure, or bar, that picks up again, where the editing stopped. You could jeopardize days of work. I do, more than anything, agree that proper notation is what I actually play, would not compose at all, if on paper was not exactly what was conceived, with rare exceptions, a little thing or two that gets compromised, cop to a fermata or something. And what I manually put on paper is what I play, if it's a work I play, only plays back like a computer plays pianos, not a real piano, but it's not as if the notation and playing don't match in all aspects of the primal beat, notes durations.

In terms of shortcuts, I came to the same conclusion, even found this company on the web today that makes a midi a performance, for a handy fee. I wouldn't sacrifice time composing to do this, unless I had nothing else to do. As you indicate, that would be like a second job, when the composing is all-consuming.

Thank you for the tips on the two products, though. I'll look into that, am not going to just give up.

Last edited by DAW Monkey; 03/24/17 12:53 PM.
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Hi
I have followed this thread with interest.
But I think at the end of the day you will have to except that Midi and Notation are two very different forms of music data.
As has been said midi is a series of commands to play a voice be it trumpet or piano and contains amongst others Note on Note off = note length, and Note Velocity in steps 0-127 = how loud the note is (this is done by measuring how long it takes for the key to descend the harder you hit em the faster they fall)
How hard you have to hit the note on a keyboard is dependent on your touch setting.
These velocity values can also be input manually in step mode in a DAW .
Midi can not read hairpins and expression from a score or slurs etc.
It really is meant for playing the notes in from a midi device, be it wind controller or keyboard.

Have a look at this below:
Coppied from, MIDI tutorials by SysExJohn

, an extremely good idea if we could map these concepts of loudness to MIDI note velocities. Lo and behold it has already been done. In XGworks, the first "proper" sequencing program I ever used, it uses ppp through fff against the note velocities in both the "staff view" and the "piano roll" windows and also within "list view" window too.

It works like this:
fff = 120.
ff = 104.
f = 88.
mf = 72.
mp = 56.
p = 40.
pp = 24.
ppp = 8.

These are, in fact, centre values, so for instance ppp is from 1 through 8 to 15, pp is 16 through 24 to 31, and so on.

How does this work in practice? Well, using my MU1000 sound module and measuring a note played at the centre values I found a difference from loudest to softest of approximately 52 decibels. Quite a significant dynamic range. In fact with CC#7 set to 100 (MIDI default) I found it difficult to hear the softest note (ppp = 8). Changing CC#7 to 120 made it audible, but then the loudest note (fff = 120) became almost painfully loud!

But you still have to play them in or enter them in step record mode .
I do not know of a score reader midi player that can do this.
Still maybe the values will be of help.

Mike


















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Originally Posted By: Mike Head
Hi
I have followed this thread with interest.
But I think at the end of the day you will have to except that Midi and Notation are two very different forms of music data.
As has been said midi is a series of commands to play a voice be it trumpet or piano and contains amongst others Note on Note off = note length, and Note Velocity in steps 0-127 = how loud the note is (this is done by measuring how long it takes for the key to descend the harder you hit em the faster they fall)
How hard you have to hit the note on a keyboard is dependent on your touch setting.
These velocity values can also be input manually in step mode in a DAW .
Midi can not read hairpins and expression from a score or slurs etc.
It really is meant for playing the notes in from a midi device, be it wind controller or keyboard.

Have a look at this below:
Coppied from, MIDI tutorials by SysExJohn

, an extremely good idea if we could map these concepts of loudness to MIDI note velocities. Lo and behold it has already been done. In XGworks, the first "proper" sequencing program I ever used, it uses ppp through fff against the note velocities in both the "staff view" and the "piano roll" windows and also within "list view" window too.

It works like this:
fff = 120.
ff = 104.
f = 88.
mf = 72.
mp = 56.
p = 40.
pp = 24.
ppp = 8.

These are, in fact, centre values, so for instance ppp is from 1 through 8 to 15, pp is 16 through 24 to 31, and so on.

How does this work in practice? Well, using my MU1000 sound module and measuring a note played at the centre values I found a difference from loudest to softest of approximately 52 decibels. Quite a significant dynamic range. In fact with CC#7 set to 100 (MIDI default) I found it difficult to hear the softest note (ppp = 8). Changing CC#7 to 120 made it audible, but then the loudest note (fff = 120) became almost painfully loud!

But you still have to play them in or enter them in step record mode .
I do not know of a score reader midi player that can do this.
Still maybe the values will be of help.

Mike


















=





Hi!

You guys are so darned smart! This issue presented here has been going on for a few months now, off and on, came to a head with me posting here, as thorough web searches as I could do answering nothing explicit enough to trust. Again, nobody on the planet, it seemed, could orient me with the plain facts of the matter you guys have posted. As a matter of fact, all the "expert" advice was always you have to buy super duper sound libraries. I would only have wasted money on pricey products I don't own, turns out wouldn't use, at least for non-orchestral, and even controller mechanisms lacking in that instruments array, albeit not all generally atrocious like piano playback. Clearly, many people, it seems most everybody, even using notation products, are not doing notation, at least the old fashioned way, rather using midi controller inputs. It's another discussion why I don't do this that goes to discipline and premeditation, thoroughness, but it sort of blows my mind nobody was able to flatout tell me a midi notation export has insufficient data to sound like the real thing. You can say it in one sentence, IF you know this, and follow that with don’t waste your money, hope you live long enough to see a truly AI intelligent product. Incredible to me the pan-with-flanged-echo-and-4-FXs-on guys, including ostensible notation experts, would say stuff like "you need Miroslav" or East West. Incredible notation websites don't address this issue, at least that I could find in a reasonable amount of time looking. Of course, the notation products companies aren’t likely to advertise notation playback midi sucks, rather give you a much tweaked demo that sounds like Carnegie Hall. I chased my tail for a long time, looking for some evidence a couple expensive libraries would do what I wanted to do, which, turns out, isn't possible, sans major manual processing of notes. I can only conclude people are automating and most not actually writing music, at all, as was done the past hundreds of years.

Anyway, thank you much for the values! I did see something in a YouTube video where a gentleman was setting velocities better, but couldn't see what he did on the screen. That is excellent information. You guys really know what you're talking about, and it would have saved me such wasted time and effort to have posted here, first, as, in a merely a couple pages and same day, you've hashed-out the matter. And I hear you, no pun intended, about those sudden-on dynamics, if a hairpin isn't the best notation leading there. I will proceed to at least set some better velocities, as forte+ wants to tear the speaker cone. (Leave it up to notation playback, you'd name all your works "Alarm Clock 1", then 2, 3...) Thank you again!

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Forgot to add, the notation product does do the slurs and hairpins, but, of the worst, lack of slurs in a midi export pretty much botches playback in terms of any quality, huge issue. I wouldn't argue the point with anybody, but AI could clearly resolve issues to the ear's general satisfaction, though don't ever expect to see this effort made with a notation tool set, since I really don't believe there's the demand for this, when there's precious little evidence on the web enough people are manually scoring.

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I'm glad this discussion has been helpful to you.

This forum is hosted by PG Music, and we haven't discussed specific PG Music products yet, so I'll just throw this out. First, a little background: I use BIAB to make composer's demos. I normally have piano, guitar, trumpet, flute or sax in some combination on the two channels BIAB has allocated for that. I absolutely love the way BIAB enters notation, and even if my end product is a dedicated notation program, I always enter it in BIAB first.

Once the notes for the melody (and often counterpoint) are entered, then BIAB plays them mechanically, as instructed and as expected. However, there are plenty of adjustments that can be made, some very easy and some detailed and complicated. BIAB can move the entire track forward or backward (in several ways), so that, for example, my Latin jazz lead line is anticipated (played early). Easy to do. BIAB can also humanize a MIDI track, under my control somewhat, by adding or deleting notes, varying the timing of the notes and the velocity (loudness), all to emulate a human player. This can go a long way to making it sound real. Finally, I do some spot editing of individual notes. I might shift the timing, change the volume, or especially change the length of the note. Doing just a little of this makes a drab, computer-sounding line come alive.

There's so much more to it, but the point is, with the right tool, amazing things can be done in MIDI to make it sound so much better.


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