Re: Are Pianoteq reverb pulses sampled?
Piet De Ridder wrote:I can only work with them if I accept and even embrace their artificiality and their many limitations. Any other approach, especially one seeking realism, is inevitably doomed to be deeply frustrating and dissatisfying to me. So I most certainly never ever consider them close to the real thing. I like to think of them, and also treat them, as inhabiting a parallel reality. The reality where plastic flowers live.
Ha! It reminds me a bit of watching computer graphics evolve through the 80s/90s/00s. I remember being blown away by the realism time and again, and now I get a kick out of showing my kids those same movies and they laugh at how poorly they compare by today's standards.
Pianoteq is such a neat intersection of two things that interest me -- pianos and synthesizers. I have the most fun with it when I play it as such. You can morph it and modulate parameters based on expression and do all kinds of things you can't do with either a sample library or a real acoustic grand, and plays so responsively! Really amazing technology by today's standards, and I'm excited to watch it evolve.
Yes I'm into using synths first and foremost here too.
I'm not too precious with trying to make the piano sounds ultra realistic to the live experience, nonetheless I feel Pianoteq just feels more like an instrument than it's sample based competition. The realism is remarkable. The relationship between playing the sounds and hearing the sounds produced is so much closer than with samples. That's more important to me than having a single key press being say perhaps 0.5% closer to the tonality of a real key because it's just a recording. The relationship between multiple notes quickly shows the advantages of Pianoteq system. A Pianoteq instrument may be ever so slightly more synthetic sounding than the best samples but actually sounding like it is an instrument in its own right rather than stitched together recordings.
Interestingly I don't find this not feeling like an instrument with all sampled instruments. Piano's resonant structure and polyphony perhaps presents greater hurdles to clear than say more monophonic wind instruments and typical solo strings. That's not to say those are realistic virtual instruments, just that I like virtual instruments to feel like an instrument when used with controllers.
