But if I can help and time permits, I will.

Awesome and amazing, sir!

But I wouldn't recommend having the mics very far away if you're going to use the piano live in a group as even a tiny bit of ambience might cause the piano to get buried under the spectral weight of other instruments.  I have the mics about as close as I can get them without stirring up too much harmonic disturbance in key areas such as the tenor and upper bass sections. If I really like the sound though... I might consider it worthwhile to jump in and edit out the harmonic aberrations.

I will try to get some time to post something as I would like for people to hear what is possible with some work but my time is stretched and we just added another set of performances. 

Interesting how little is known about PT editing.  In another forum, I mentioned getting notes perfect by fixing mic error, phase error, unison tuning error, and reconstructing the note harmonically... and a few posters scoffed at the idea of "perfect."  I did notice that these criticisms came from folks that own the usual array of monster memory pianos.  However, it is true, you can get notes perfect (free of annoying quirks) and if you do that for the whole piano... you may end up with a perfect instrument.  My guess is with the D4 and particularly the Bluethner, that you should be able to get about 95% of the defects and anomalies in the PT models exorcised.

I'm not sure if PT has video tutorials on editing since KNOWING what to edit is something hard to teach unless you can point it out audibly.  But if I can help and time permits, I will.

Cheers,

Joe

You just said exactly what I was thinking!

But I suspect all that tedious work might be 'worth something' to the very patient and skilled developer responsible...

But then, also to hungry or curious potential users.

Cheers,

Stephen.

ATTACKS - the only thing I've discovered is that I can't get rid of obnoxious hammer noise on some notes.  It looks like there is some cross modeling/sampling going on there between the fundamental and the noise sample/model which makes editing to perfection, impossible.  Even when you lower the hammer noise to minimum and just listen to the fundamental... it is too percussive and sounds like the hammer noise is still there. 

But if you're hearing something wrong with the attacks in general, or don't think there's enough of an attack... I would take a look at your DAC.  We recently conducted a mastering DAC comparison (everything under $5k) and found huge differences in transient reproduction when going from a $700 DAC to a $2500 DAC.  RME's under $2k tend to compress transients/attacks a little whereas a Bench Mark DAC yields a very clear and delightful piano note attack... night and day between the two.  I have everything here in the studio from Apogees, Rolands, Lynx, EMM Labs and I use the Lynx Hilo when playing Live.  If your budget doesn't allow improvement on that front... then rev the pianos up to 96K and you will get considerable improvement.  I have run mine at (internal speed) 192k but I can't find a processor that can handle a full down the piano gliss with the pedal down.  The system belches, PT overloads and cuts out for a second and so I had to drop back to 96k/24bit.

But I do agree with you about getting the pianos right.   The stock renderings of these pianos (all of them), are just not there yet because they are models left without enough tedious editing to make them stunning.  This is the same issue with monster memory VST pianos... no one's doing the hard work.  Not enough work has been done to make the PT pianos playable at concert volumes without ripping someone's head off.  That being said, there are few people knowledgeable and willing to do that tedious work.

The Steinway, Bluethner, even the K2, can be molded into gorgeous instruments but it takes time, infinite patience, and a combination of science and art... not to mention a learning curve to understand the PT software.  The other PT pianos require too much work to get them to the same standard but they are still useful for special apps.  If I purchased PT with the edited models I'm using... it would've saved months of work and that's the level of work I used to spend on the digital pianos I designed for artists all over the world... from scratch.

At one point, I thought about having to lug a laptop with all the weirdnesses and the cables, the DAC and interfaces on the job... versus having an all in the box solution.  So I bought a Roland RD800 and the Yamaha CP4 figuring I would find one or the other would be best... but neither is the best.  The Roland suffers from an non-adjustable, unnaturally short decay and the Yamaha sounds beautiful on stage but playing it convincingly soft is just not in the cards.  If I didn't have the PT pianos prepared and ready, I would have been very frustrated with these keyboards.  So, all the hard editing work was not only worth it but it was the only option to having a magnificent instrument to play that responds perfectly and predictably to every nuance when exposed solo, with demanding passages played delicately soft, and at concert volume.  Incredible.

BTW sampling and generative seems a great hybrid for me, never thought about it! M. Guillaume, did you ever considered it?

Of course he did. Most of the action noises (sustain pedal thump, key release, etc) are sampled in Pianoteq - it would make no difference if they were actually modeled. They're actually (very short) gzipped samples embedded in the executable and the VST module, which is why the program doesn't need an extra directory containing those samples.

BTW sampling and generative seems a great hybrid for me, never thought about it! M. Guillaume, did you ever considered it?

It's already been done (TruePianos, Ivory...) before. Philippe is all about getting the model right