Topic by Xain

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  • Xain
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Topic: Kremsegg "missing" keys (feature request)

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to vent out something that regularly bothers me. I really love Kremsegg Erard, it does have a special and round sound that I find perfect for most genres. However, the real instrument happens to have 86 keys, and PTQ developers faithfully reported this limitation in the program - which is perfectly understandable for philological reasons.

However, PTQ does already give the option to artificially extend existing instruments - should I cite the 108 keys "Steinway D"? - and I think that not everyone has philological reasons to use a certain piano. Why shouldn't the Erard have the right of having a virtual B and a virtual C, so that most written music can finally be played on it ?

Tell me what you think (or if you know of any workaround that I wasn't aware of),

Andrea

Reply by Arkanda

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Re: Kremsegg "missing" keys (feature request)

This was already discussed. But for now, I cannot find that thread either.
As far as I remember, many of the historical instruments already have an extended range indeed
(compared to their real world models). And the problem of a further extension would be, I think,
you then could hardly discern any different pitch any more, due to the character of the instrument.
Likewise, take a small uprigth with 88 keys and play the highest two notes, you need a trained
ear to really hear the base note, it disappears within the fraction of a second, only a number of overtones left.
So I guess it could be extended on PTQ, but would not be of any practical (= audible) use.

Last edited by Arkanda (19-03-2018 19:06)

Reply by _DJ_

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Re: Kremsegg "missing" keys (feature request)

Xain wrote:

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to vent out something that regularly bothers me. I really love Kremsegg Erard, it does have a special and round sound that I find perfect for most genres. However, the real instrument happens to have 86 keys, and PTQ developers faithfully reported this limitation in the program - which is perfectly understandable for philological reasons.

However, PTQ does already give the option to artificially extend existing instruments - should I cite the 108 keys "Steinway D"? - and I think that not everyone has philological reasons to use a certain piano. Why shouldn't the Erard have the right of having a virtual B and a virtual C, so that most written music can finally be played on it ?


i don't know how you happened upon this usage, but it seems that you're confusing "philology" (the study of language and its historical origins) with "history" (and its study thereof).
English, lingua horribila that it is, tends to be admittedly a little murky in this regard (the study of history being conflated with history itself... one i suppose could employ "historiology", but ugh it's a horrible word and, for good reason, not commonly used... "i'm a historiologist"!? i don't think so...)
so i can't really think of any properly philological reasons for using a certain piano (in what way is a piano concerned with the origins & evolution of language? while an interesting question, is rather far afield from the schwerpunkt), but i can certainly think of tons of good historic reasons to do so!  (ie not that the reasons themselves are of historic value—though that may certainly also be true—but rather that they stand in consideration of history... |historic| doing double duty here)...

to your point though, as Arkanda mentions, this has been discussed before.  my personal take on it however (coming from a historically-informed perspective here) is that if you want to play repertoire that uses more notes than a particular instrument has available you need to either a) tweak the music you'r playing to meet the instrument (we see, for instance, Beethoven & Schubert doing this all the time in their compositions with dropped octave doublings and octave transpositions of material simply because the instrument they were using didn't allow for those "extra" notes), or b) pick a more suitable instrument for the repertoire you'd like to play...

Last edited by _DJ_ (20-03-2018 03:26)
Matthieu 7:6

Reply by dingo

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Re: Kremsegg "missing" keys (feature request)

The study of history (strictly speaking, of historical writing) is called "historiography."