Trying to upgrade from 6 year old Roland FP-30x

... Unfortunately, they have messed with the super light, light, medium, hard and very hard key touch sensitivity so that the lows and high registers reach higher volumes easier and that you have to pound the mids to get higher volumes.  Since this is not a linear curve, messing with Pianoteq velocity curves will not solve the problem as it applies the curve to all keys. ... Any ideas people?

Since this is a key-dependent velocity issue, I would advise you to adjust the Velocity Offset of each note independently using the Note Edit feature (Note Edit of the Velocity Offset is available in Pianoteq Standard and above). This should allow you to correct the overall velocity differences of the different keys.

If Velocity Offset is not sufficient for your needs and you want to go deeper, the next thing you could do after that would be to adjust the Hammer Hardness note-edit curves in the piano, mezzo and forte range (this options requires Pianoteq Pro).

pianoteqlover1 wrote:

Thanks for the responses.  While it was interesting seeing what Pianoteq itself could do to solve the problem by playing around with curves along with note editing, I cannot get the Nuvola GX to work with my workflow.  I had both my old 30x side by side with the plugged into the same Pianoteq instance.  The fact that the old 30x still sounded betters with no modification is very telling.  I've decide to re-buy the 30x as its probably going to go the way of the dodo soon, and I have no complaints with it and its the cheapest solution (assuming Roland hasn't messed with the touch sensitivity in the last 6 years on it)  Also, I work with other VSTs inside Reaper so any other expressive VST are going to present similar problems but will have none of the tools Pianoteq provides.

as mentioned above Velpro is agnostic of any VST and you can create curves by zones on your keyboard for various VST's . Also GIG performer allows you to divide your keyboard in zones and has a dedicated velocity curve editor by zone with a nice smooth function to perfect your curves.

Pianistically wrote:

pianoteqlover1 wrote:

Thanks for the responses.  While it was interesting seeing what Pianoteq itself could do to solve the problem by playing around with curves along with note editing, I cannot get the Nuvola GX to work with my workflow.  I had both my old 30x side by side with the plugged into the same Pianoteq instance.  The fact that the old 30x still sounded betters with no modification is very telling.  I've decide to re-buy the 30x as its probably going to go the way of the dodo soon, and I have no complaints with it and its the cheapest solution (assuming Roland hasn't messed with the touch sensitivity in the last 6 years on it)  Also, I work with other VSTs inside Reaper so any other expressive VST are going to present similar problems but will have none of the tools Pianoteq provides.

as mentioned above Velpro is agnostic of any VST and you can create curves by zones on your keyboard for various VST's . Also GIG performer allows you to divide your keyboard in zones and has a dedicated velocity curve editor by zone with a nice smooth function to perfect your curves.

What troubles me about MIDI software solutions is this: once you’re in the MIDI realm, there are only 127 possible velocity values. To map 127 values onto 127 values, you either change nothing, or some multiple input values get mapped to the same output values while other output values go unused. You necessarily lose resolution.

So it seems to me it must always be preferable to get the velocity curves right in the keyboard hardware itself, where it can (presumably) read and process raw sensor values, before it gets “downgraded” to 127-step MIDI velocity.

That does raise a question, though. Internally, when Pianoteq implements a velocity curve, the input is 127-step MIDI, but is the output 127 discrete steps (as it appears on the graph), or does Pianoteq internally map the output to a finer resolution and interpolate smoothly between points?

Pianistically wrote:

[...]the number of discrete values going into the engine.

We don't even know for sure, that "discrete" values are going into the engine after the MIDI mapper.

An arbitrary illustration with the damper pedal curve from a recent thread. A user remapped the four discrete pedal values [0; 38; 74; 127] of a Korg Digital Piano to the orange curve. The interpolated values on the orange curve can be calculated and they are [0; 23.5; 88.9, 127]. When the audioengine is not limited to the MIDI-protocol, it can use the non-whole numbers 23.5 and 88.9 directly for the audio sustain level.

If the input of the audioprocessing is (unnecessarily) limited to the MIDI resolution, the numbers 23.5 an 88.9 have to be rounded beforehand, for example to 24 and 89.

We can only guess, what happens internally.

Of course, that has been completely out of question. Nice description again.
My point has been the transport of values after a MIDI-1.0 value has reached the MIDI interface input.

With engine I meant the audioengine, what Pianoteq is in the core. Audio levels can be processed with higher resolution than whole numbers. When a MIDI mapper interpolates, then non-whole numbers are possible (see my example). What happens from this point on, is intransparent. Probably the non-whole numbers are just rounded, but we don't know.

Here's the interesting part when comparing the FP-40 and Nuvola GX with my old FP-30x -- they sound perfect with Rolands onboard engine thru their speakers.  So I would recommend this keyboard to people that aren't going to use them as MIDI controllers.  So they must be doing something strange in their software to get it to work for their native sounds.  I think my testing shows their must be some kind of compression going on for the mid range notes (By this I mean two different physical velocities producing the same MIDI value -- at least what Pianoteq is seeing). Also perhaps "expansion" in the low and high range notes (maybe gaps in the curve to get to high velocity values quicker)  But I am confused here -- how can it be? And what would be the reason to change from a linear or uniform touch sensitivity to something completely different?  My therory -- maybe to make the low and high notes "pop" sort of like setting you EQ on  a stereo system  to "Classic Rock"  or "Pop" settings.  But I actually didn't detect this on their own sounds -- it seemed uniform to me.  I am completely stumped here.