This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
OK1’s Reviews
Every piano needs a piano samplist
We like to think that life is additive, and music is additive. But sampled instruments are reductive, instruments by their very nature are reductive. Meaning like subtractive synthesis, we are bounded, by a limited set of parameters to carve out sound from all that is possible from the osciillator.
This piano reminds me of that - the original piano itself is a reduction, from wood and steel, to produce a specific combination of sound from very specific elements.
This sample further reduces that origin, to present us with a version - a snapshot. Every sampled instrument needs the rigmarole - fitting it to your keyboard, cos the creator has no idea what kind of keyboard you are using, and how to map that to the sample layers provided.
This curve fitting is hard work, and many a sampled library, succeeds or fails not because it was not well sampled, but because there is no well defined world standard for fitting the sample layers to your midi keyboard controller.
It took me iteratively, a few hours, fortunately I was familiar with sforzando player, which is the version of the sample instrument which I am using. Sforzando has no features for adjusting velocity mapping - none. So I use midiCurve by InsertPizHere. best evert tool for this, its a plugin a MIDI plugin.
Someone needs to create a video or step by step process (maybe I will) - How do you take a sampled library/product, and make it translate to what is a real instrument. I can imagine so many have given up on many sampled instruments, cos this process can be frustrating if not well understood.
In this case, you need a bit of splosh - if you do not know what that is, a few episodes of Christian Henson's youtube channel, should sort that out.
Of course somewhere in there, you need to be listening at the right volume, how does one define this scientifically ? Just get the volume right somehow.
Then this piano oozes a rawness, a character, a semblance of the real piano from which this sample was taken. Nothing else will ever sound like this piano sample set. Nothing. Each piano has things it excels at. In this case, I'd say it will do a rock piano, like Elton nicely - stabby brash chords, It also does delicate, quirky, film piano very well. It's its own thing. Not the piano for every song. So rather than try to force this piano to obey you, it will not.
You have to learn this piano, every note, caress it, like a love partner, and eventually it discloses its charm, and tells you what kind of music it was born to play. The imperfections add to the realism. It feels very very transparent like clear piece of glass. Sure it has grit, but mostly crystal clear. Study its harmonics on every note, with a spectrum analyzer. I use SPAN by Voxengo (who doesn't?), to understand what you are hearing.
I'm keeping this. It will always have a use.
Would it not be wonderful if every piano was sampled, and stored away for posterity, as this one has been sampled. So the piano can live on. Eternal, almost.