MIPA awards 2010

...And the winner is Ivory. Let me laugh. I bought it (version 1.7) quite resently and I have to say it's quite useless to me. Big disappointment: It's not well sampled and it's almost impossible to calibrate it to feel right (with my Roland). Also the stand-alone is out of date and un-intuitive. (Is there anybody who wants to buy mine? ) PTQ is thousand miles ahead if you want to have an innovative product! There's no question about it.

Anyway this is what Ivory II promises to us:

"Ivory II is the next generation version of Synthogy's virtual piano engine that drives our Ivory Grand Pianos, Ivory Italian Grand and Ivory Upright Pianos products. A host of new features have been added to the Ivory II engine including Sympathetic String Resonance, a sought after but elusive characteristic of real pianos that Synthogy approaches in a completely new and unique way to realize the true complexities and subtleties of sympathetic string excitation.

Ivory II also addresses Synthogy’s most frequent customer requests with features like Half Pedaling, Lid Position, Pedal Noise, and Tuning Tables to deliver the most detail and control available in a virtual piano. Additional features like Timbre Shifting, Parametric EQ, and new Synth Layer control offer powerful new sound sculpting capabilities for custom piano programming and sound design.

The new version also features further development of each Ivory piano including more velocity levels (up to 18 per piano), more soft pedal samples, more release samples, with greater fidelity and refinement than ever before, surpassing Ivory's already unmatched playability."

...OK. Maybe they have managed to improve it. Still I'm quite sceptic about it. Anyway Ivory II is again one example of "Sampling Strikes Back"; I can see so many examples of products that try put some modeling (especially String resonance) and user-controlled parameters to their sampled pianos.

Eighteen layers of velocity?  I'm getting 128 levels of velocity and damper control, and there are efforts by some to increase the number of velocity levels.

The fundamental problem with samples is that music isn't a static set of disconnected sounds, and samples by their very nature are static.

G

I could have warned you.  Compared to Pianoteq, Ivory's a late-'80s Casio.  When it was first released, it was absolutely an improvement over other piano-sample libraries, but Synthogy's dragged their butts.  Live by the sample, die by the sample.

You doubt wisely.  The effect is akin to taking a glass vase, smashing it into hundreds or thousands of tiny little pieces, and then reassembling the mess and expecting to successfully recreate the vase (i.e., to "get your vase back"). 

As for the MIPA awards -- meh.  Awards from magazine writers look good collecting dust on a shelf (or taking up space in a glass case, if you're really vain), but bragging rights bore me to sleep.

I especially have to laugh at the "Software Instruments" category;  really, only three nominees?  And how in the bloody 'ell could Largo not beat the living stuffing out of Ivory?!?!???!  Were the voters inebriated and unable to cast accurately?

Really, the list looks like a "who's who" of advertisers in those magazine.  Waldorf should have bought a few extra pages, I guess.  (Note:  I can think of several programs that could give Largo a good 12-round fight, but I'd want them all to win.)

And, by definition, "software instruments" should have many sub-categories.  Trying to compare apples, oranges, potatoes, and eggplants really isn't fair to the developer community.  And the image painted for potential users is neither accurate nor comprehensive.

In fact, awarding Ivory II the prize before it's even been released to the public (May 2010, y'all!) is a bit like crowning the cat in the bag "Potentate of the Jungle," only to find out that the feline in question is more tabby than tiger.  Hype, baby, hype!!!

Most innovative - the TC Electronic PolyTune pedal.  I'd have to agree.  Guitarists are going to love this one.  I wonder if they were able to patent the concept.  Someday they'll have a polytune for your acoustic piano .

Most acoustic guitarists -myself included- have pickups installed.  It's just so much easier to get a decent live sound that way.  If you can believe YouTube videos, it really seems to work well.  I'd probably wait till there's a model where you can define alternate tunings as now, it only works with standard tuning -albeit, transposed up or down.  And I'd definitely try it out at a music store.

Do you remamber Drake, a chip to create intermediary quality velocities, to solve the problem of velocity layers limitations ?
It was a chip for the Promega 3 digital pianos.

Do you remamber akoustic piano, with also have velocity layer algorithm to create intermediary velocities between two velocity?

Well, why those technologies did not solve the problems, since the libraries keep growing and growing to allow more and more velocities ?

Probably cause the algorithms was not very good, or not good enough for the most piano virtuous and exigent.

The same thing probably will happen to Sympathetic ressonance algorithms, cause they do not really emulate sympathetic ressoance, but try to accommodate several sampled sounds together, trying to ressambe it.

After get used with pianoteq's true symphatetic ressoanced most people get a dislike for sampled libraries, similar to dislike people used to good real grand pianos have about sampled pianos.

I don't doubt pianoteq somehow pushed sampled pianos and piano libraries companies to invest in aprimorate their algorithms; and now  Synthology is trying to get sympathetic resonance for Ivory.
But samples have a limitation barrier, no matter how huge a library can be.