How To Increase Realism in the Middle Registers

Well, PLAY version doesn't give you the flexibility you have in Standard or Pro to adjust the harmonics and resonance and all other parameters, at all. So you're kinda stuck with what you got. You can try tweaking EQ, but it will be applied to ALL the notes, not just the middle range.

Sure we do mention it, look at my signature!

I was vastly underwhelmed by the feel of the keybed of V-Piano. And the sound was nice, but not really Pianoteq nice. And not really Pianoteq price

Thanks for replies.

I am using headphones at the mo - good quality Sennheiser, but quite old, and I should test on proper system (if only I had one).

Interesting - I loved the VPiano action and sound - I guess it's an individual thing, but that was playing through £400 monitors!

Cheers
Richard

"I love the sound in the higher registers, and the lower ones, but the middle octaves seem the least satisfying in terms of capturing the subtleties of a real piano experience."

I'm glad I'm not the only one out there who feels this way.  When I first heard a Pianoteq demo audio file containing some high chords with the sustain pedal down, I was blown away with the resonance.  To my dissapointment though after playing around with the trial version myself, I could not quite capture that richness in the middle of the piano - to be more specific, an octave below middle C to about a fifth above middle C.  This section, unfortunately the most played area, has a sterile quality, no matter what model piano I choose. 

I am a professional jazz/pop pianist and amateur piano tuner and I've been blessed to sit down and play on all types of pianos.  On even the most humble spinet upright piano, if you give it a good tuning and hold the sustain pedal down and play a loud C major chord right in the middle of the piano, you get a wonderful rich harmonic experience.  I haven't found that experience testing digital pianos and sampled piano software (although Ivory II claims it has found the holy grail of resonance - we shall see) and Pianoteq gets part of this right and the creators are to be commended for their great strides.  However, due to lack of raw computing power and modeling compromises, I'm not ready to abandon the real piano experience, either playing nor listening to a recording. 

Having said that, are there Pianoteq Pro users out there who were able to circumnavigate this synthetic quality by adjusting the attack, resonance, and harmonic spectrum on a note-by-note basis?  All I ever get when I mess around with the harmonics is an instrument that sounds like an organ mixed with a vibraphone!  :-)
I feel that I step way out of my league when I start fiddling with the harmonic spectrum controls.
 
I am sure that Philippe, being a piano tuner who has played countless acoustic pianos, knows how his creation stacks up against the real thing.  I just hope that he and his team are able to develop a product that is more convincing than a "TeraByte" sampled piano (which, in the end is just a collection of pretty acoustic snapshots of a piano forever frozen in time).

The following is a midi recording produced by a jazz pianist from New Zealand - Doug MacKenzie.  So keep in mind that it IS NOT ME playing.

http://www.box.net/shared/6epy8o76cg

Have a listen and judge the sound of the middle registers.

Glenn

I can hear these problems (*) in McKenzies left hand strikes (especially when he hits harder). So for me it's more like lowmids (not midrange) problematic. 

(*) Anyway this is problem for myself and obviously for some other people too. But if somebody is happy with it, it's fine with me. And like mr.Dragon said, there's this subjective part of whole thing. I love many things with PTQ - its fantastic GUI, resonance, playability, mic positioning just to name few.