TruePianos

[filkertom]

KVR Audio has had a thread going for a few months now about an upcoming piano VSTi that just sounds incredible -- a hybrid instrument, so that it hasn't got nearly the drive footprint or streaming delay of a fully sampled piano, none of the processor overhead or choked notes.

The name of the beastie is True Pianos. That web site is just a placeholder... but this is a video of musician Dave Rich playing with it. (You might also want to listen to the two MP3s in the first post on that thread.)

ME WANT NOW.

Comments

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

Sounds beautiful. Wish I could play. But...when you say it's a "hybrid instrument," are you saying it's essentially a hardware synthesizer with a little bit of software?

Mind you, my only experience with this stuff is messing around with the Yamaha XG software synthesizer, playing MIDI files. The XG sounded a lot more like a real piano than the regular MIDI sound synth. So keep it basic: I'm kinda a country boy, and ain't up on all this kinda larnin'.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, it is basic. Understand that I may have the terminology wrong here and there, but I'm pretty sure this is the layout of the theory.

You've got three basic kinds of software instruments: samplers (which play recordings of actual instruments), synthesizers (which generate sounds intended to mimic actual instruments), and hybrids (which combine both methods).

Samplers often have the best overall sound -- hell, Gary Garratin has a sampled Stradivarius violin (http://www.garritan.com/stradivari.html) you can buy -- but the total sample library sizes for such instruments can get into the TENS of gigabytes, and they've gotta be read off the hard drive before they can be played, which can cause a delay, and the computer can only handle so many in RAM, which can cause a delay, and the better the sample the bigger the .WAV file, which can cause a delay....

Synthesizers either have wave generators individually or in combination to create sounds. Sometimes these are remarkably good and realistic; sometimes not. But the idea is that they don't actually use prerecorded sounds. These often are a lot smaller and faster than samplers... but they also often don't sound anywhere near as good.

(Note that I am not getting into the relative size and quality of different samplers here. That's a whole 'nother conversation. Suffice it to say, relying on the badly-cut-down Roland Sound Canvas derivative that comes with Windows XP is possible, if you process it enough, but Thank Cthulhu For Soundfonts.)

Hybrids combine the two methods: applying internal processing to sweeten, enliven, stretch, and otherwise tweak a sample set. (To clear up any possible confusion, this is not the same as having effects, such as reverb, built into a sampler; this applies only to the dry sound.) The advantage is what you'd think it might be: better quality sound with less system overhead.

(For a whole lot more on synths, including software links all over the place, go here (http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/01/26/synthedit1_0105.html). And Wikipedia has an excellent Audio Engineering page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Audio_engineering) that'll certainly help.)

Not all that many years ago, the problem was overwhelming your computer, period. Nowadays, though, computers dedicated to music -- especially those used by pros -- tend to be much more powerful. The dynamics of use have shifted, though -- there's more of a trend towards live performance and/or elaborate orchestration. So having something that sounds really good yet doesn't devour your system resources, especially on a basic instrument like a piano, is A Good Thing. Especially if this beastie ends up not costing too much. (Synthogy's Ivory (http://www.synthogy.com/) Froogles out at around $320, and bluntly it doesn't sound anywhere near worth it to me. I've got free soundfonts and VST synths nearly as good.)

Oh, and -- I don't play either. :) But it's amazing what you can get away with just by playing with the MIDI Velocity parameter, and nowadays that's usually just drawing with a mouse.

One other thing: Yamaha's "XG" might've been the name of one of their synths at one time, but now it's more commonly used to refer to Yamaha's proprietary extensions to the MIDI standard. Basically, if you see "XG" on a synth, either hardware or software, it's got lots more bells and whistles, so to speak, than a General MIDI synth. It will certainly play General MIDI files; it's just got a lot more that you can dig into and actually control and/or create than the basic. Interestingly, while it's a standard that has taken hold throughout the hardware industry, I don't know of too many musicians who bother with it -- if they create MIDI files, they tend to want them to sound as similar as possible on all MIDI instruments, which means they stick to the General MIDI 1.0 standard. Short form: XG doesn't matter.

(Man, I gotta write a book.)

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. It's an amazing look into something I was dipping my toes into. And yes, you SHOULD write a book. Since you're already starting something of a discussion group about it, and are much more a guru about the subject than the rest of us, you ought to reap the rewards of such a venture. (Although, thanks to the Internet, pretty soon nobody will ever be paid for writing anything any more.)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words. But, I most likely wouldn't charge for it. 'Cause I'm really not a guru, really I'm not. I'm just finding stuff out by playing with it, which is admittedly a lot of fun. On the other hand, one of the problems I have with the music forums is that they tend to be populated by very friendly and helpful people who, just like other types of techies, tend to forget that the folks they're trying to help don't necessarily understand all the concepts, or aren't looking for the biggest and baddest and most expensive solution to a problem. For instance, I've had people shoving Reason (http://www.propellerheads.se/) at me for a few years now, and it looks like an amazing instrument... but it's not gonna help what I'm doing.

[kaththeamac.livejournal.com]

Amazing video. He talked about taking it to gigs. Does it function like an electronic keyboard, then, or does he have to take the computer et al along as well? It certainly sounds better than my keyboard, which is a Yamaha Portable Grand DGX-500, which was the best electronic sound I'd heard until now.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

It's a software plug-in, what they call a VSTi (Virtual Sound Technology instrument). You press a key on the keyboard to send MIDI data to your computer, and it routes that data to this rather than to another internal or external synth. Most digital audio workstations (DAWs) will handle VST (used mostly for effects processing) and VSTi easily -- there's usually a simple command or button to put one into a specific MIDI track.

I don't know what keyboard he was playing -- could've been anything from a full synth with full weighted keys (which it did seem to respond like) to a relatively simple MIDI controller. Any controller you're comfortable with would do; I imagine your Yamaha would work just dandy.