The scene opens with the performer,,,. The performer takes a bow.
Love the performance and your theatrical description! Thx for this.
Sordess
]]>The scene opens with the performer approaching a majestic Petrof P237 Monsoon acoustic grand piano.
The feed cuts abruptly to the performer at home with no Petrof piano, but instead equipped with a simulation of an Ant. Petrof 275 acoustic grand piano.
The piano simulation is powered by Pianoteq 7.5.4 running on a concealed Raspberry Pi 400 and a Kawai Novus NV10 with a Millennium III grand piano action. The interface is featured gloriously on an iPad, acting both as a piano visualizer and controller device. This is a luxury, since Pianoteq can be controlled directly from the Novus.
The system works wonderfully, with superb playability on the grand action, and fabulous sound experienced via the Novus. The integrated woofer brings the bass to life. Pianoteq is shown effortlessly modeling an Ant. Petrof while capturing the performance.
The twist is that the piano is not actually in equal temperament, but tuned to Kirnberger III temperament. This is a risky choice on the part of the performer, though perhaps, the stakes are not so high. Sarah McLachlan recorded Last Dance on a random out-of-tune upright piano, but here, the virtual piano has been very deliberately configured with a historical tuning, employing technology that did not exist in 1997.
Let's leave the technical mumbo-jumbo aside and allow for some musical storytelling.
The poor ballerina collapses. She gets up gingerly and resumes a gentle dance. That was almost the end of her story.
Throughout the piece, the performer has been pedaling mercilessly and the virtual piano strings have been resonating, painting a rich musical tapestry. For a brief moment of Zen, that pedal is released, while the dancer reassesses.
Her life is meaningless without dance.
We take a moment to enjoy the deep bass of the Ant. Petrof and crystalline clarity of the treble. This even inspires our tiny dancer to improvise a few steps that were not quite part of the original choreography.
The ballerina grows bolder. She outdoes herself in what turns out to be her last hurrah. Her heart gives and she collapses. She never rises again. She had always loved flowers.
End credits are shown. The performer reaches out and deliberately halts the piano simulation.
The feed cuts back to reality. The performer takes a bow.
]]>Note: I wrote this app, so I am a bit biased
Great app! Occurred to me that you could probably easily run this on some small e-paper tablet for a low power keyboard control. It's way more high contrast than the pianoteq desktop app, thus would work well! Plus, probably more screen reader accessible.
]]>Just catching up on this whole thread and have to say I love this! I have a Raspberry Pi 4 (with 64bit Pi OS) and a HiFiBerry DAC + enclosure, and now I'm going to see if I can get the headless Pianoteq + VNC setup that navindra has sorted out. Will let you all know what my experience is on that front once I get going. Glad to find some like-minded people here!
Hi,
If you are going with an headless option I suggest that you give the little app a try. It will allow you to control your Pianoteq instance from your phone or iPad without having to VNC it. I found it to be easier to make instrument changes and some slight tweaks with the app. It does not replace the need for VNC when you need to go deep in the tweaking but for day-to-day playing, it serves me well.
Github repo : https://github.com/robert-rc2i/ptq-client-webapp
Note: I wrote this app, so I am a bit biased
Cheers
]]>Hi Everyone,
...It appears to be connecting ok, and it also works fine on my Macbook - just not on the Pi for some reason.
It turns out that my kernel was not new enough... so did an rpi update:
"sudo rpi-update"
Thanks you so much for all this wonderful information. I'm trying to make up a similar setup for my Kawai keyboard, I have a Pi400 setup with a MOTU M2. However I cannot get the MOTU M2 to make a noise! It appears to be connecting ok, and it also works fine on my Macbook - just not on the Pi for some reason.
Does anyone have any ideas on what I might be doing wrong?
It doesn't seem to output audio from anything VLC etc...
$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: b1 [bcm2835 HDMI 1], device 0: bcm2835 HDMI 1 [bcm2835 HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 7/8
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
Subdevice #7: subdevice #7
card 1: M2 [M2], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Any-help would be gratefully received as I've spent a good while trying to get this sorted now
Thanks!
]]>I had been considering buying a new Clavinova but to get anything decent would have cost at least £2500. Having replaced the felts the keyboard is perfectly adequate for my standard of play and now with Pianoteq playing to external monitors (the 115 can't take an input) the sound is better by far than anything within my budget.
However I find the external monitors a bit overpowering and I would really like a complete solution where there is no visible change to the Clavinova. To that end I have ordered a 100w amplifier and a pair of 50w speakers to replace the CLP 115's 2 x 20w speakers. I see no issues with fitting them into the Clavinova and then when I can get a raspberry pi4 (they're out of stock everywhere just now) I shall put that into the Clavinova as well (the pi400 won't fit).
So when that's all done I will have a near 20 year old bottom of the range Clavinova sounding like....whatever Pianoteq makes DP's sound like!......and the only visible signs will be two extra power cables emerging from the bottom and a midi cable visible for an inch or two.
At the moment I see no issues with achieving this. If the amplifier and speakers I've chosen aren't quite right it will be a simple matter to change them. Having saved £2000+ I feel I've got some money to play around with!
So again thank you for all the helpful posts on here.
]]>I don't think you can look at objective numbers like velocity layers and come to a subjective conclusion that you might like Pianoteq better. There are many factors involved, but I think a large component also has do with how resonance is handled. This might be why people coming from acoustic pianos often take to Pianoteq. Garritan CFX is definitely very popular as well, though I have never tried it.
You can get the free trial of Pianoteq and experiment with it. Personally I hooked up an external audio interface and I used regular MIDI cables to avoid a ground loop situation. I only use speakers but headphones work perfectly. I'm happy with the setup.
You can post detailed questions or comments about the Novus directly in the forum here:
http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads....oards.html
Have fun and enjoy your piano!
]]>I have a few question and hope you can answer them to help me better understand the general function/purpose of various VSTs.
For now I have no intention of running the PI 400 setup as you described in this thread. I'm not that bothered about the cables etc, so I will want to connect my NV10S (once it hopefully arrives in about a month) to my PC which has a 10700K, 32 GB RAM, PCIe SSD etc. The reason is that I want to run Pianoteq (or similar) from a device that (at least from what you said) will not break a sweat running even the most extreme scenarios.
Thus, my questions are general in nature regarding these types of software and what they do in comparison to running the piano with default out of the box software.
I'll give you a bit of background to help you answer my questions with as little effort as possible.
I bought the piano because I have neighbour troubles when practicing. They don't mind the teaching, but apparently the repetitive nature of practicing is really annoying to them (and I can appreciate that). I can still practice a small amount per day non silently, but I will need to practice mostly with headphones. I went for the NV10S because after trying it out 45mins per day for 4 consecutive days (unlike with the Yamaha N1X and N2) I was fairly convinced that for all intents and purposes it behaves just like an acoustic grand. The sound from the speakers doesn't quite represent a concert grand, but for me it's as good as a small grand and certainly better than my truly excellent Yamaha U3 upright.
I'm sure you've noticed that I wrote "fairly convinced" and that's because in the end I was still left with maybe 0.1% of doubt. Of course it's difficult to make a definitive determination after 4 days of short practice; and once I get the instrument this might quickly be dispelled through regular use. However once I found out about different possibilities (partly through your YT videos:) I have decided to prepare in advance and investigate if perhaps it's possible to dispel that remaining 0.1% of doubt in case it doesn't get dispelled just through regular use of the piano in it's default state.
In the process I worked out what I think is the key difference between the pianos default functioning (+ other sampled software doing essentially the same) and Pianoteq; and which was possibly the cause of the small amount of niggling doubt. Namely, the number of velocity layers on the Pianoteq is 127 vs up to only 16 using sampled sound, giving infinitely better dynamic control an making it in that respect essentially indistinguishable form an acoustic piano to the human ear. This to me is actually the key parameter to be able to convincingly mimick the acoustic grand on a digital instrument. The other is the action and of course the NV10/S has that and then some (which is also why I didn't get the Yamaha's: no proper pedal mechanism and the action is only OK while the Millenium lll is simply amazing!).
So with the background out of the way these are some of the questions I have and would greatly appreciate if you can offer your findings/opinions:
- with Pianoteq you can tell that you get infinitely more dynamic graduation and this in turn allows the instrument to without a shadow of a doubt feel and behave 100% like an acoustic piano? Or is it all about just a better quality of sound? Or both?
- if the answer to above is yes would this be the same with the Garritan software? Or is that still only a sample so the velocity layers are once again limited to max 16? (I ask this because I really like the CFX sound in that software, at least from what I've heard on YT).
- once set up, whichever software I chose, the sound can be reproduced through the speakers and the headphones? And in terms of the sound is it an improvement through the speakers, too, or only through the headphones? I ask this because as mentioned I will use the instrument to teach on, as well as for my practice.
- how does it all work? This is what I understood so far and you can let me know where I might be wrong or have perhaps misunderstood: you connect the PC using a printer type USB cable with the NV10/S. You also connect from PC line out to NV10/S line in using a dual male headphone jack type cable. So it's 2 cables total running from PC to the piano? Then you install the software and you're pretty much good to go?
- while using these VSTs do you still retain the virtual technician and other functions on the NV10? For example, when trying out I found that unless I set the minimum touch to 1 the piano is a lot less convincing as an acoustic instrument. Also some headphone settings really make things a lot better vs other settings etc.
I tried to condense it as much as possible and I sincerely hope it's not all to much. Any response will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
]]>I think I clocked it at 18 seconds of cold boot time now (at best) and I'm on the latest 64-bit OS image.
I also control my most often used features directly from my piano via MIDI mapping. For more complex stuff, I use the iPad. I'm looking forward to enjoying the innovations that the new JSON-RPC API will enable:
https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9053
https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9073
Then I may just run Pianoteq headless, kill the need for VNC, and instead let the UX be drawn entirely by the browser.
Ultimately, the entire point of this is to enjoy the piano. The magic is that there is no Pi:
]]>I think I would like to take this plunge to the Raspberry Pi dedicated solution.
Any particular reason to use the RPi 400 keyboard setup vs. a standard RPi4?
I was looking at this setup of the RP4 with the Allo Digione Signature Board. See the link below.
I know the the Pi 400 is faster out of the box. Seem to remember it runs at 1.8Ghz vs 1.5 in the normal pi. So maybe you can get a smaller buffer or more polyphony. On the downside you lose the small form factor.
]]>Any particular reason to use the RPi 400 keyboard setup vs. a standard RPi4?
I was looking at this setup of the RP4 with the Allo Digione Signature Board. See the link below.
]]>Here's something I performed and recorded live on the Raspberry Pi 400 (second half):
I'm a beginner pianist, but what Pianoteq afforded me here was the ability to create something individually unique, and hopefully, something musically interesting.
The Raspberry Pi 400 never broke a sweat with this piece. It was flawless and invisible.
I ran Pianoteq on it at 48000 Hz, 128 samples, and 256 polyphony (never got this high), in real time. I had two simultaneous VNC sessions open to it to monitor recordings. I controlled switching purely from the Novus touch screen.
General Pianoteq highlights:
I never lost a recording -- MIDI auto-archiving is priceless.
Capturing MIDI with the ability to tweak voice settings and re-render extremely high quality audio is priceless.
Reviewing my performance on Pianoteq allowed me to identify many mistakes, such as missed or silent notes, and diagnose issues with my performance. Even when I wasn't performing on Pianoteq, it was always recording. Truly instrumental to the learning process, when you can no longer have a teacher by your side. It taught me to me listen more intently while playing.
I left the Pi on for many hours and it was rock-solid.
Really interesting!
I am curious, are you / can you feed the Pianoteq sound back into the Novus to take advantage of its amplification and speakers?