Pianos: Playable, versus Sequencing.

Guess what? I bought yet another piano! This time it is "MyPiano" from FluffyAudio. And.... like Alicia's keys, I'm definitely not a fan of playing it live. There's something about the response that just feels wrong under the fingers, and I dislike the tone when I'm actually playing it - somehow, the high notes sound very close, whilst the low register sounds very distant >.> There is also an odd lag - as if I'd set my buffer size to 256-ish - that only shows up in certain passages. I'm already got my buffer down to 64, and tried it on Kontakt standalone as well as Konkakt inside Logic. Same thing.

Being not too happy, I booted up the Pianoteq stage demo for a comparison, and (*&£$ yeah, I loved how Pianoteq responds to my playing. However, I decided to record the midi this time, and applied it to MyPiano (as well as The Old Lady). And it sounds... pretty good! Especially after reverb has been applied and some mild limiting on the output stage. Old lady sounds good as well on this midi, just different.

Pianoteq on the other hand was more difficult to tame in the mix due to the immense dynamic range - perhaps that is why I don't really enjoy the rest of my virtual pianos - their dynamic range seemingly pales in comparison to pianoteq.

Hence, I think I've come to this conclusion that the many piano VIs I've licensed just don't play that well as a live instrument. Heck, I prefer the piano's onboard sound chip's response versus all the virtual pianos I've got, apart from Pianoteq.

Guess I'll have to get me a pianoteq stage license some time down the line for playing, and the rest of the piano VIs for sequecing, because I do love their tone :3 I played a bit of my jazz grade 2 stuff on MyPiano, again, it sucks under the fingers, but the tone is good, so I think this is a good purchase, with the caveat that I don't like it being played live :3

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Edit: Tried some bach midi's off the web with all 3 vis mentioned above, sounds damned good, though arguably, I prefer the tone of both the sampled pianos. Best tool for the job I think; pianoteq for playing as a live instrument; sampled pianos for sequencing and tone/character :)

Edit 2: After tweaking the "Velocity Control" page, MyPiano becomes much more playable, though even with low buffers, it still feels laggy. Ah well.

Invention | Fünf | Sequenced

Bought Soundiron's Lakeside Pipe Organ over the Thanksgiving sales, and decided to sequence it in Logic as I thought I did a pretty swell job with this particular invention.

This was not the case, as my teacher picked out several places that could be improved, like the harmony being not as strong as it can be, as well as many improvements that could be done with the cadences.

Another point brought up was the repetitiveness of the melody. In any case, he feels that I have got a good hang of inventions, and we're moving on to 3 part counterpoint next. Woo!

Invention | Fünf

Another two part invention :) I think it modulates well between the keys, and I've made it as melodic as I can in both staves. Also, there are some fifths in there that I've purposely left in to smooth out the melody lines. I'll see what my teacher says.

A few piano VIs

Being the black friday weekend, I picked up NI's Alicia's Keys for at half off. It sounds pretty good - after increasing the stereo width control - but there was just something about the playability of the VI. On a whim, I decided to download the trial versions of two other pianos I've been meaning to try, Truepianos and Pianoteq.

I must say I'm quite surprised. Pianoteq initially sounded quite boring, until I tweaked some parameters - I'm only on headphones, so changing the output type from "Sound Recording" to Stereophonic or binaural made a *huge* difference. Also, I love the ability to draw a custom velocity mapping curve, again, that helped greatly. Finally, the ability to adjust the difference in volume between the ppp and FFF - wow. What's best, is that after I fell in love with the playability, I checked out the website in more detail, and found out that the latest D4 piano in Pianoteq was actually modelled after a Steinway D! Even more win!

I then switched over to testing Truepianos. I must say, that the sounds of Truepianos has much more bite and character compared to the Pianoteq. Just A-Bing them made it painfully obvious. On the flip side though, I felt like I couldn't get as much dynamic range out of Truepianos versus pianoteq.

Other pianos I compared them to were my good old sampled Old Lady piano, which I now found quite thin compared to pianoteq. Maybe I need to increase the stereo width like Alicia's Keys to get the bite I want on headphones. But it still played very nice.

I think I definitely want to get the "stage" version of Piantoteq soon, I just love how it plays under my fingers. The others are great sounds, and will definitely be useful depending on different genres of music. However, in terms of playability, I think I like Pianoteq the best.

Invention | Vier

Pretty pleased with this piece. I made a lot of effort to get the modulations between the parallel keys as smooth as possible and I think I succeeded. About 6 or so hours in total. I need to do something else now :P

OpenSource/CC/Low Cost/Free Music Software and Samples

Just a post to keep track of stuff like that.

Scoring:
MuseScore
Rose Garden (linux)

Percussion:
G-Town Church Sampling Project

Impulse Responses for convolution reverbs:
Samplicity Bricasti M7 impulses
Samplicity Bricati M7 Impulses for Logic Pro's Space Designer

Invention Drei

Working on this for several days now, and I'm pretty pleased with the modulation from Dm to A, though I think the modulation from A to Dm could be better. More practice!

"Contemplation" - Jazz Piano

I'm still working on several ABRSM Jazz Piano Grade 2 pieces, and this beautiful piece, "Contemplation", by McCoy Tyner, really spoke to my heart. What's more, the improvization section is very straightforward (improvise over Am7 and F) - very easy for us newbies, and I can just keep on experimenting. Hence, I thought what better piece to try out my new piano samples on :3

Sadly, my new piano samples don't react the way I expect from my midi data, so until I find out how to correct that, I switched over to my favourite, the SampleTekk PMI Old Lady. Steinways FTW!!!

While the piano sounds as awesome as usual, I came into some very nasty distortion issues when attempting to apply some compression. After much time spent, I finally figured out that there were certain frequencies that I had to cut out, if not there will be distortion after going through any dynamics processor.

It was actually a visual guess - I saw some frequencies poking way above 0db on the EQ's analyzer, and decided to deeply cut those frequencies away and hey, that worked! With that fixed, I applied some mild compression and got my limiter close to about 0.2dBfs.

Using the VSL Hybrid reverb nowadays, and picked the "Brown Hall" for my ER. I'd really wanted to pick an IR from one of the famous halls (so I can brag, hey, this is what it sounds like in the Mozart Saal Konzerthaus :P) but the brown hall just sounded the best to my ears.

Forward!

Feels like I can improvise better....

Been putting more effort into doing improvisation recently - and I think doing the counterpoint exercises helped alot as I now tend to remember my scales way better than before. Re-visited some pieces that I could not really improvise on and found that I could do much better than before.

Another thing my teacher says, the idea behind counterpoint is really ear training, so that seemed to help as well. Counterpoint ftw!

Invention | Zwei

I think the modulation between keys is not as smooth as it can be, something I need to work on. Else, there are sections in there I'm quite happy with.

Saxophone Log: October 2012

Very rushed, only practiced an hour-ish yesterday, and another hour or so today for practice + recording. This is more or less the sheet music being used with a few bars of improv. Ergh.

Upright Bass: Kontakt Factory Library
Piano: SampleTekk Rain Piano
Addictive Drums

Invention | Eins

Counterpoint | Minor

Slowly, but surely, I'm starting to hear when things are not "right" between the two lines.

Pizzicato - not the same IRL

Attended a live orchestral performance today, and one thing that stood out a lot to me was the pizzacato strings. They sound totally different from the samples I have. Very smooth, not like the very percussive samples I have. I'm probably playing them at high velocities, lower velocities hopefully will yield what I heard this fine evening.

Looks like I will want to allocate some budget over to attending live performances. I'm not only interested in a full symphony orchestras, small performances like string quartets are also very interesting to me.

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I've been giving some thought about my music pursuits lately. I really have no idea where I want to take it. I don't believe I have a deep seated passion in it. Yet I pursue am wading yet deeper into it like.... er... a spatula mixing a... a chocolate cake mix. Yeah..... oh wait, I think I prefer pancakes. Damn.

Looking back, this all started with the Winter Jazz course I attended. That really sparked a flame in me, I really wanted to improvise and stuff. During that course, it was evident that every single instructor there could compose and play the piano at a high level. I pretty much went down that route.

But what do I really want? It seems like I have not only gone off course, but went off the motorway, crossed some borders, and jumped onto a highway in another country.

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Since beginning harmony and counterpoint, my music tastes appear to have changed as well. I'm beginning to feel unsatisfied with nearly everything I listen to. Especially after I started score study, I am really appreciating what kind of amazing art goes into classical music. And at the same time, alot of the pieces are just too damned long for me to "get" in their entirety.

And then older stuff I used to like, I'm slowly picking out bits that are now feeling very... uncomplicated. No, not sure what kind of word would describe it.  Perhaps repetitive? Ah, don't know.

What I do know, is what I am learning is both fun and challenging. So, I'll keep at it.

Counterpoint | Minor

Continued exploration into minor counterpoint, with an emphasis of both parts sounding smooth. Will probably tweak some more before I submit :)

64bit :3

Have shifted to running Logic in 64bit mode for a few weeks now, and I'd like to report that.... nothing has changed.... :P Only one AU plugin is still in 32bit, AAS's Strum Electric Guitar, won't be updated soon, and I don't use it much, and appears to work through the bridge. Finale's playback plugin appears in the 32bit bridge but who uses that in Logic? :P

The last package I had to shift to 64bit was XLN's Addictive Drums. Erm, nothing to say there. They've got a nifty new installer that downloads patches and all from "the cloud". Everything else worked out of the box, and my lastest saxophone track ran AD without any hickups.

Can't see any advantages either, I don't use that much ram. I had 7 instances of VI Pro running, AD as well as one instance of Kontakt (for the triangle) no ram issues. Yet.

The only other virtual instruments I use - that are already 64bit out of the box - are VIs running with the Aria sampler. So, all of my Garritan (sorely underused nowadays now that I have Kontakt) and Plogue VIs ran with nary a hitch.

Woo!

Counterpoint | Minor

Counterpoint: Minor

And we begin counterpoint in minor modes. I absolutely can't do this without a guide indicating which mode is which :-/

Castanets!

Like whoa. What a performance. I really want a castanet patch now (did I mention I'm a sample junkie?).

Plus watching the string performers is giving me some ideas on what kinda string patch to use. Double win!

Counterpoint: Major

Two part counterpoint! It is actually quite fun when you get down to it :3