Creating your own custom Velocity Curve

Thanks for the response.  I will check those out.  I am thinking possibly all it's really going to take is doing a custom curve in Pianoteq.  I am just curious how one goes about getting the best results designing that curve (the actual thought process behind the actions).

I could fiddle with curve line but I am hoping there is a professional approach to that such as, hit the key as hard as you would possibly strike the keys and be sure thats where 127 lands.  Then as soft as you could possibly play a note, is where 1 lands.  Then do such and such to fill in the center of the curve.  The center is how I would love to see how people have designed.  Because you almost could do more then one depending on the pieces you will record.  However I am so accustomed to a grand piano feel, once it's regulated to your liking and tuned, you don't "change" the way it reacts by changing anything other then "how you play it".  That's what I am looking for here is the hopefully one all be all curve that makes it like my grand where any nuances are done by my playing, not by making another curve.

It almost sounds like I am answering my own post with that last paragraph.

Maestro2be

I feel Pianoteq's sound quality is so high that the limiting factor for how "good" Pianoteq is is mostly down to the MIDI controller keyboard (and the speakers)
I think a good feature for Pianoteq would be some sort of "keyboard calibration wizard" which helped users set up a calibration curve for a MIDI keyboard.

I am in total agreement with these statements.  I think it would be amazing to get a calibration wizard to help you tune your keyboard to Pianoteq.

I am already getting such great sound that it would really be a great finishing touch.  I wonder if we could get some kind of a verification from Guil or someone if this is possible and if they will look into this for us please?  Would be very helpful.

Thanks!

i'd just like to second this, i think it's a big factor for user experience, much more so than subtle details in the piano model.

My example is this: I wasn't too happy with my combination of pianoteq+doepfer lmk, for in those keyboards, as in many others, the black keys are weighted lighter than the white ones*; and there's of course no way to get a velocity gradient over the key range. It didn't feel right and was hard to control. It took me a while to see the problem not in pianoteqs engine, but in missing MIDI preprocessing.
So I hacked together a sequence of midi filters in logic's environment editor that reduces the black keys' velocity by some quadratic formula + ran the whole keyboard range through a weak s-shaped velocity gradient after that. it's quite different now - I've finally got this feeling of being connected to the piano in pianoteq. this was on pianoteq 2, mind you, so it seems all the stuff that happens before ptq's engine even gets the midi data to work on is just as important  to me as an ever more perfect piano model.
i don't know why, but for some reasons the hardware keyboard action actually _feels_ different if you play around with the velocity filters.

so, yeah, it would be nice to have some of this onboard in a usable (but flexible) way. i know you can already adjust the volume over the keyboard range - nice! But I'd suggest we need that for velocity, not so much for volume. The next point is grouping velocity changes (e.g., all the black keys, all the Cs or whatever) and a gradient on top of that. I don't know how difficult it would be to integrate those things with the velocity editor we've got, but i suggest you need two things: a curve that maps velocities to velocities  to control the behaviour of the whole keyboard  (= the one we've got), and a curve that maps a factor to each key of the keyboard with the ability to restrict that curve to selected keys only (!).

anyway, you might even think of a file format that allows users to share velocity settings; as in: "hey pianoteq forum, anybody interested in a lightweight, precise action for the XY keyboard?". that would be quite cool.

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*side note: doepfer's lmks do have a built-in 'reduce-the-black-keys'-function, but this thing doesn't multiply black velocities by a factor, instead, it reduces them linearly. which just doesn't make sense if you think about it: chose between no black ff whatsoever or still too loud in mf.

Jake Johnson: nice!
now if modartt had something like this on board of pianoteq so it works for non-windows users, and add some usability tweaks, we'd be set

If you have a digital piano with the velocity already set up I would use the straight default curve, especially if you are happy with it. All digital pianos will differ from one manufacturer to another anyway so there is probably no hard and fast rule as to what is right or wrong.

If you want to add more expression when playing pianissimo, making the curve more concave will allow you to do this. If you get used to this however, you may find the action on a real piano feels very sluggish (especially a grand piano) by comparison.

A word of caution, do not make any segment of your velocity curve horizontal. If you do you will have "missing" velocities. There are only 127 velocities available in MIDI, if a horizontal segment is 20 bits wide you will lose 19 of the 127 velocity combinations.