I hope you guys don't get bored with me yet...
I found an mp3 for a classic piece using samples and knowing that I normally like more clear pianos I wanted to try and make this one which is much warmer and less bright than I's done so far..
What do you think?
http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/uploads.p...sic_03.fxp
http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/uploads.p...sic_01.mp3
(don't mind the errors in there... i'm not much of a classic player...)
cheers
Hans
Nobody is tired of anybody. Pianoteq opens up entirely new worlds, and we're all just starting to explore them and learn from each other.
And yet, and yet....the mp3, on my system, is really low on volume. Maybe it's just me, but I turned my volume up all the way and still had to strain to hear it.
My sense was (despite the low volume or because of it?) that the dynamic range wasn't what I wanted--the timbre didn't seem to change at all from bar to bar. I wanted some sense of the felt damping the sound on soft strikes. Maybe this sense came from the piece--Late Baroque\early Romantic pieces tend to have fewer changes in timbre since they were intended for instruments that had a more limited timbre (no piano, then). (Did I get the time period right?) Or maybe the mp3 was rendered from a midi file?
Can you do it again, louder? Always interested in what you're experimenting with.
mmmm... i will look into it...
I did sense a lack of dynamics myself but not as much as you describe...
I did play it myself - both were parts of Bach pieces, first one from das Wohltemperierte Clavier... so your time-period was head on...
was the sort of sound better suited for classical music or am I completely off here?
Definitely a more classical sound. Not sure why I wanted it louder, but I think that may have contributed to my not hearing much in the way of changes in the dynamics. But remember that I'm not a classical player, so don't pay too much attention to me.
Still working, here, to get a piano that sounds like the one on Joni Mitchell's Blue. I may do what I've been avoiding so far--doing a spectral analysis of some notes on Blue and then edit a PianoTeq preset and doing the same analysis on it to see if I can match them up. I've just been relying on my ears, so far.
Is anyone doing this--creating a spectral profile and then editing a PianoTeq preset and creating a profile of the sound there too, going back and forth to match them up? (A nice new feature for PianoTeq: Automatic spectral matching: Play a recording of a piano and Pianoteq creates a preset with the same harmonic profile. I'll post it in the wish list as a dream feature.)
woa that sounds like some option alright
must confess I have just been going by ear so far....
Jake, I don't know that album - not much of a Joni Mitchell fan myself.. but the other day there was this movie 'Love Actually' on tv in which 'Both Sides Now by' her is heard.
That made me try an improvisation of that tune with an edited version of my classic:
http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/uploads.p...hsides.mp3
http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/uploads.p...sic_05.fxp
cheers
Hans
Nice version of the song. Nice clean arrangement and playing. I haven't heard that piece in years. What did you do to the fxp? It sounds different, but I'm not sure how. Clearer in the lower mids, somehow, or maybe this piece just uses the lower midrange more.
Blue is a later, much darker, on the edge of the cliff album that often gets mentioned in those absurd lists of the "best popular albums of all time." It marked the end of her folk period, but came before the more uptown sounds of "Court and Spark." Many sad, sad songs. It shows her piano playing at its strongest and I've always liked the warmth of the recording and the timbre of the piano. (I can almost hear the classically trained people here groaning over a post about Joni Mitchell. Forgive me.)
If you get the chance, turn up the volume and listen to "River" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" on Blue. They're late night songs, though.
Hi Jake
Thanx, I'm going to listen to that album for sure - if only to see if we can get a piano to sound like that
Don't feel bad about a post on someone - I'm into rock and progressive music like DreamTheater myself - not really Classical oriented - although that band's keyboard player was classically trained - at Juilliard I think.....
There are quite some changes to the fxp - I went from medium to warm C2 model and had to change a lot of the values like hammer hardness - the overall sound is pretty much the same as the other but it has a slightly better dynamic response and the spectrum is prob a bit different in the mids yes....
The largest diffrence for the mp3 is that this uses real chords where the earlier baroque piece only uses a couple of notes played together so the harmonic structure of the sound is less obvious.
cheers
Hans
Just so you know: On a lark, I used Google to search for "Joni Mitchell River" and came up with several mp3 sites that had links that read: Joni Mitchell River, but they brought up an MP3 recorded by someone else that doesn't sound anything like the original. This mp3 has an over-enunciating singer and a much worse piano sound. Some kind of synth piano. The original album doesn't sound anything like this mp3.
This is worrisome outside the context of what we've been talking about. People having heard the recent cover of the song might Google it and come up with this bad version, and think that it was the song on the album. I'm not even sure why this mp3 has been posted--it's not for sale, so the creator isn't exactly posing as Mitchell to gain income. Instead, it's just dumb. It doesn't help the creator and it damages Mitchell's reputation because it clearly represents itself as a recording by her. This kind of thing hurts everybody.
(I did find one or two mp3's from the original album, but they were either converted to an early version of the mp3 format or are strong arguments for avoiding the mp3 format entirely. The vocal suffers a lot, as it always does on mp3's of anyone with a wide range, and the piano sounds even worse.)
hmm that's odd, someone just 'posing' as her, doing a bad job, AND not even try to gain from it and there were no notes with it too? ah well....
Ya compression like the mp3 format is a good thing when you know what you're doing and need to keep filesize reasonably small, but it can be a bad thing when the compression is overdone.... it's like the jpg files that can be overly compressed and thus ruin the image.