Can you post an mp3 or wave file of the recording that you liked so much, or a link to the site?
About the fxp: I still suspect my own settings. And sometimes speaker filtering just gives you the sound that you want. In any case, we're all still learning...
You may know much of this, but... :
By the velocity settings, I meant the velocity settings on your midi keyboard. Most keyboards have a way of setting the ratio of actual velocity to the velocity that is registered and thus played, with some settings registering low strikes transparently--what you play is what you get-- and others reducing them to lower velocities. (Many variations, here--slowing the rate at which low strikes become high strikes is the usual change, but some settings also increase the velocity response or reduce the velocity of the very highest strikes.) It can get confusing, since the exact numbers involved may not be in the manual for the keyboard. And developers use their own midi keyboard, of course, to create their final drafts of each preset, so it can be hard to tell how much difference there is between what you hear and what they heard. (The original desire was to be able to reduce the velocity because samples were recorded with high strikes and low pass filters were used to reduce the amplitude of transients and high partials. Creating a velocity curve let users increase the strength of playing without hitting the brightest sounds too easily--the filter was set to respond to velocity, so the desire was to give the player control over the velocity.)
PianoTeq moves beyond samples, but like older instruments, it lets you set a velocity curve. The result is still that anyone can very likely create a preset that sounds very different when played on another keyboard. Small shifts in the software velocity curves, given the user's midi keyboard's velocity settings, can move things around much more than was anticipated when a preset was created on another keyboard with its own velocity settings.
To make things more confusing: some keyboards have a problem registering very high or very low strikes. It's not unusual for a fairly expensive keyboard to have problems registering a velocity under 10. This seems like a small problem, but often the player adjusts both the velocity scale and his or her playing (and filters, if using samples or a vst filter on PianoTeq) so that soft playing sounds like soft playing, and the entire scale of velocity to timbre becomes very different from what it would be on a keyboard that registers the velocity scale accurately. The user reviews at HarmonyCentral.com can be of help in learning about the velocity problems with various keyboards.
From what I can gather, new midi specs will soon create many more velocity layers. How individual, older keyboards (like mine) react to these changes is up in the air. It's going to be interesting...
In any case, can you post an mp3 of the recording that you liked so much or a link to the .wav file?
Last edited by Jake Johnson (29-07-2008 02:54)