And to drive us all a little further out of our minds, there's also Sympathizer, which I'm sure a few people have played around with. At first, you may hate the sound, since the effect needs tweaking to fit a piano at all.
There's a demo version at:
http://www.soundbytes.de/Sympathizer/
Before you experiment:
The demo only runs for about 30 seconds. All of the presets have the effect turned fully on, which will drown out PianoTeq at first. Go to the Sympathizer interface and turn down its Dry\Wet setting in the lower right corner to hear how the sounds can combine. You may want to use a PianoTeq fxp that limits the decay somewhat and reduces or turns off the PianoTeq reverb (which I like). Remember that you can reduce the sustain time and amplitude on each bank or all four banks of resonances, so the long, sometimes soaring sounds in the presets can be tamed if you want to focus on a more "natural" sound.
Be sure to look at the interface long and slowly and to read the help and FAQ pages that come up when you click on the Help button on the interface, and of course keep the volume down well below that of the main instrument.
The bad is bad:
1. You set fixed pitches\freqs for the resonators. In other words, as far as I can tell, and I hope I'm wrong, they strangely won't adjust to the pitch of each note. More of a drone effect than a partial creator. The only and limited work-around is to use the key range setting to limit the volume on some notes and then load multiple instances of this vst and set their ranges accordingly. I'm writing the developer to ask that he include the ability to pitch shift the sounds in relation to the midi note in the next version.
2. The physics of the instrument aren't considered. Although velocity will determine the amplitude of the harmonics and you can control separately the sustain and damping of each of four sets of partials, this program essentially just creates tones, regardless of the size of the instrument, whether the lid is down, etc.
3. Not sure if this is bad or good: you can easily create many strange sounds. Do try the presets with a fairly dry PianoTeq preset. Some respectably demented textures to be found here that can be revised, if wanted, to realistic sounds.
Strong limitations for our purposes, yes. But the good is good:
The nice thing about this one is that it lets you turn off any or most of the 28 resonators, so if the CPU load is too heavy, you reduce it. You can add just one or two partials.
The other good things:
1.You can select the material of each of the four banks of resonators, from gut (knob to the far left) to metallic (knob to the far right). Since you can use different materials on different sets of resonators, and combine them with slight variations in unison tuning and amplitude, you can get many timbres out of this.
2. You can detune the unisons.
3. You can set the stereo spread of and pan the resonators.
4. You can control both the mod source for the damper (it's not set to "foot" by default) and the slope, the rate at which it cuts off high frequencies.
5. You can create that roar that builds up in a piano with lots of big chords. You'll hear the possibilities for creating this when you listen to the presets.
I hope this doesn't cause too many crashes or headaches. It at least lets us explore still more variations in piano sounds. And it's a lot of fun.
Last edited by Jake Johnson (13-03-2008 19:51)
