Is Mastering Necessary?

well... longer answer: you could also try one or a few tracks by yourself, then send it/them to a mastering plant and compare.
There are some powerful VST plugs now (even some free ones...), you can achieve an amazing job with those
If you think about it, Pianoteq is nothing else than an amazing plug-in itself...
You "just" need a very good, reliable monitoring system, some knowledge of EQ, compression & all, and... good ears ! :-)

very nice link! Thanks for sharing!

Well, to be honest, I thought I could tell it because I'm probably better at the engineer position than in front of my piano! My studio is running since more than 30 years now while I'm still struggling to play Mozart's K333 sonata correctly... And even if I'm in love with this piece, I'm afraid it will never happen, LOL !

Hello All,

Uploaded to the Users area is an mp3 file of MacDowell's "Witches Dance" performed by Yours Truly on the Steinway B.  The audio randomly switches between "out-of-the-box" Pianoteq and my shot at "mastering" the same piece.  I attempted to keep the volumes within 1db of each other so as not to bias one's opinion.  Obviously, this is impossible 100% of the time because the Mastered version does manipulate the volume as part of the mastering process.

No attempts were made to make the out-of-the-box file sound "deliberately bad;" you will hear audible clicks left in the audio as the mp3 switches between examples, so it's somewhat easier to tell when the switches were made.

Here's the URL:  http://www.forum-pianoteq.com/uploads.p...UG2017.mp3

Listen for yourself (preferably through a good set of headphones) to notice audible differences.  In my opinion, both files are decent and they represent audio rendered from the same performance.

Cheers,

Joe

Hello Gilles,

That's the effect I was striving to achieve:  positioning in a wider, more natural space ... just feeling more real.

The fine art of mastering is "not" grabbing you by the shirt collar and shaking your neck to make you aware the track has been mastered; rather, it's about allowing a sound to (appear to) blossom as a natural event as perceived by the final listener.

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I LOVE Pianoteq!!!!!!  The out-of-the-box Pianoteq Steinway B preset sounds perfectly adequate to my ears and playing fingers.  As such, however, it is only a starting point into the audio chain of a finished piano performance.  No claims are made that Pianoteq eliminates the need for a mastering house in the event that you wish to release your own album involving a piano.

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The whole point of this exercise was to keep the piano sounding essentially the same.  While I am not a professional mastering engineer, there are subtle changes that can be made to a given mix.  Based upon what he may have heard in this musical example involving Pianoteq, it's up to the original poster of this thread to decide whether he needs to retain the services of a mastering house for his new age- and jazz solo piano album.  Only he can make that decision, and justify the sometimes considerable expense in doing so.

Personally, if I were going to release an album of my own classical piano music performances (whether via Pianoteq or live studio recording), I would use the services of the best mastering facility I could afford.  My opinion only.

Cheers,

Joe

P.S.  I may have gone overboard in the sheer amount of reverb to distinguish the altered sound from a stock Pianoteq Steinway B preset.  Also, because Pianoteq presets often present the sound from the perspective of the player seated at the keyboard (bass notes heard towards the left and treble notes heard towards the right), I swapped the channels to give the impression of an audience member listening to a performance.  Again, subtlety is the name of the game.

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EDIT: 
Revealing exactly what I did in this case -- Actually, Pianoteq sounded fine without much help from the ear of a mastering engineer.  (I specifically did not alter anything in Pianoteq's Steinway B Recording 2 preset except to reduce the Main Volume slider from 0dB to -6dB.)  Pianoteq is already quite good on its own and did not require much in the way of "mastering" to make it sound in a more natural acoustic.

I did just two things:  1) I reversed the channels as described above, and 2) added one instance of an Altiverb convolution model of a Lexicon L480 digital reverb's stock "Medium Hall" preset on a separate Aux Bus, so that I could independently vary the amount of input signal and third-party Altiverb reverb.  That's all I did in this particular case!  Another important job of a good mastering house is to make sure there are no abrupt changes in volume or perspective when multiple files are compiled into a CD or other delivery medium.

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