Two more pop-rock Yamaha videos

The second video have a nice woodness, despite the problems commented above.

What causes the woodness? The mics too close, ressonance of little wood pieces ?  I can't get this woodness feeling no matter adjust I try in mic position or reverb on pianoteq.

If someone know what adjust are necessary to get that, please tell me.

I thinks the "wood ressonance", this feeling we call woodness, is the final frontier to pianoteq.  After they get that, it will be invincible.

Lid... I forgot that completely...

Well... I closed the lid, and it helped a bit, but it's still not the same.

But the mic position confuses me, cause it seens to get inside the piano with the close dlid, depending of how we place the mic, adjkusting the top and the front view.
Ex: Close the lid, place the mic over the area of the closed lid (in the top view perspective), and place the mic in the same height of the keyboard (in Front view perpective).

Those position represent inside the piano acoustic box. So, when lid is closed, a little movement up or down would represente the mic scaping the box, like a ghost crossing a wall.  I supose that after "crossing the wall" it should make a impressive diference in sound, but it just change a little.

This  a very clear studio recording, of a piano with a beautiful ressonance, including woodness, I ever heard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPmMRliLu0A

Listen carefully just to the piano solo segments. Each chord is loud, clear, bright and with a strong ressonance together, without sound metalic, and the ressonance sound like somehow smoothing a fraction of the note. This ressonance It's like a bright tone mixed with a second tone, making it beautiful and very clear.
In pianoteq I think still lacks part of this somehow.

In 2:38 to 02:40 we heard some nice mini sounds, maybe from the small intern pieces ressonating a bit near the harp.  Maybe when average computer power get better, pianoteq could modelle the noises and smal pieces ressonance too.

I like this too - absolutely stunning. This is the kind of sound I was craving in the past. Right now, I'm craving a purer kind of sound, like the George Winston example I posted earlier, or the Sarah McLachlan examples.  Another example is the opening of Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind": (iTunes required)
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSt...p;s=143460  I know that a large part of what I like is probably the skill of the recording engineers.

Greg.

I think I'm getting lost. I hear the sound of the Angel on Canadian tv as being entirely different from the sound on the Jerry Lee Lewis recording. I do like the JLL sound, but the unisons are much more detuned there, and the soft treble rumble is missing.

Are we all just liking the presence of the notes? (Beto: I don't know what you mean by nose at all. Can you expand? Are you playing the piano with a nose? I can't begin to imagine trying to imitate a piano sound with either the nose or the mouth. Help me out.)

There's another variable to watch out for when assessing live piano recordings - there are techniques to "microphone" the piano which don't involve recording the vibrations of the air, such as the Helpinstill pickup (which is a magnetic pickup for the strings, I believe), and also a transducer which is stuck on to the body of the piano and picks up the vibrations mechanically.  I have no idea how often these techniques are used these days though. (anyone know?)

Greg.

Since I kept the graphs, might as well post them :

http://picasaweb.google.ca/gllsprs/Spec...onMn8bdeQ#

Maybe Philippe can have a look if he feels like it, and tell me if I'm wrong. I am not an expert in signal processing, so there may be something obvious that I miss.

These were done with an old version of SoundForge (4.5)

Note that the second harmonic is a little bit stronger than the fundamental at velocity 60 for the YC5. We can also see that the YC5 has a lot more high frequency content at velocity 127 than the C3, like it was designed to have.

I might explain the importance I give to separate note timbre by the fact that I like to play polyphonic music. Of course, chord resonances are much more important in actual use and pianoteq has always been outstanding in this much more difficult to attain goal.

Thanks Gilles for these graphs. I just did a few ones myself and found something similar as you, although it depends at which moment you do the analysis (where is the window of the Fourier analysis and what size it has). If done at the beginning of the note, then the difference is smaller between the two instruments. I think it’s part of the instrument sound, the C3 has more low frequency rumble, the YC5 has a dryer attack. Changing the global resonance may have some effect. Concerning relative strength of the harmonics, one must take the beatings into account, as a window located where the beating is at the minimum will hide the fact that later this same harmonic can be stronger. Of course there is no such problem if the Fourier analysis is done on the whole note.

What I try to say is that in the same way the nose give a extra sound when we speak, combined with the mouth, in the Jerry Lee Lewis recording there is someting in the note's sounds, and in the resonance, that resemble that.
it's like this "extra sound" combines with the note sound and during the note duration oscilated a bit.

  My Roland F-90 sampled piano have not that, and I don't think I never heard something similar to that in most piano library, or not that well in any one.

  The example I gave was to try yourself imitate the sound of a note, but not speaking the notes (Do, Re Mi...)

Gilles, it' not pinching the nose I refer. I refer to allow the nose participate more in the sound we produce, like more air coming from it, like trying to use the nose to imitate a resonance.
    We are accustomed to the expression "nasal voice", like some secretary, but this nasal voice, from the popular expression, is cause some people do not use the nose while talking, getting like pinching the nose.

I don't think so, cause all keyboard range have that "nose resonance effect".  It remambers a bit the "wood sound" we use to say, but quite less grave.

My suggestion for pianoteq implemantation is to add new ressonance algorithms to the small pieces on piano, and "modelled noises" able to interact creating resonances.
  Sure it would take a lot CPU power, but it could have a option to disable, returning to sampled noises as is now.
Consumers with high velocity dual processor would have no problem to use this new functions.

  Sometimes I imagine pianoteq could do anything if ours computers had enough power.   Perhaps Modartt work, about create a complete natural sound to run on any mediun computer, it's quite like try  to put elephants in a volkswagen.

Yes, IMHO some of the richness in the JLL is due to unison detuning.
I do wonder whether the detuning in Pianoteq is as rich as it is in a real piano - I'm not sure it's not the same, but I can't help wondering.

Greg.

RE: the JLL clip, definitley a honky-tonk unison detuned sound IMHO.
Also, the very pleasing sound when he hits the very low notes (e.g @41s) might be due to the way it's tuned - that note might be beating in a slightly dischordant way with the higher notes, which makes it sound very rich.  It'd be good to get an opinion on this recording from a piano tuner. IMHO the overall sound was intended, and it works really well. 

And then there's the resonance/body of the sound.

Greg.

For me it's not just a matter of brightness or not, but how the sound tone oscilated along note duration, creating a kind misture, a bit like two tones in one.