AzureFeast wrote:Hi there,
I am very enthusiastic about the playability of Pianoteq 3.5. But I am still slightly concerned about how to obtain a more "intimate" sound. To give some examples I am thinking of Elton John's "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" or "You Song". In a different style, the piano sound of Tord Gustavsen. I rec[k]on that it may have more to do with recording techniques.
Marc for Azure Feast
Hello Marc,
I completely agree with you that the piano's sound you desire has everything to do with recording technique.
Upon reviewing many Youtube videos of Elton John, I noticed most of the time, his piano lid was closed or nearly closed. (As an aside, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow and others frequently perform in public with their pianos' lids completely closed.) On a few occasions, the piano lid was completely removed, yet the sound was distinctively that of an Elton John piano.
His recording engineer's secret is quite possibly found in the Helpinstill piano pickup that does not use a microphone per se, but has long bars of pickup mechanisms placed very, very closely to the strings. Thus, the same "Elton John sound" is produced because the electric guitar-type pickup does not rely on sound traveling any distance through air, whatsoever, to reach a conventional microphone; in other words, the piano sounds much the same despite having the piano lid closed, partially opened or occasionally completely removed.
Please have a look at the following URL, where Elton John, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow and other performing artists are specifically mentioned as using these unusual pickup devices for the past several decades. These particular pickups are similar to guitar pickups, in that they generate a signal from the vibrational movement of the steel strings, rather than having a conventional diaphragm (as in a regular microphone) that picks up sound waves in the air. This pickup scheme being very similar to a non-microphonic guitar pickup has the advantage of zero audio crosstalk between piano sensor pickup and the performer's vocal microphone.
http://www.helpinstill.com/
Click on the video on the Helpinstill website to view the geometry of the pickup and watch how the pickup is installed in a grand piano.
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Regarding a Pianoteq emulation, I do not have a specific .fxp file to send you, but it does appear that any emulation of an Elton John / Helpinstill pickup would involve the pickup to be extremely close to the strings.
In particular, one might wish to use four or all five pickups, with the first one or two placed about 1/6th of the distance along the string away from the bass note strings' hitchpins, and place one or two others near where the dampers of the midrange strings would be, and the remaining one or two pickups in a way that captures all of the high notes -- this is to evenly capture the sound of all of the strings. One can adjust the volume and panning (or lack of panning) of these closely spotted pickup points that captures all of the notes of the piano with equal intensity.
I would also agree with EvilDragon's assessment that Pianoteq's own reverb would be shut off, but with an additional detail that the signal gets fed through a third party electronic reverb unit, either hardware reverb unit or a virtual reverb unit, rather than an emulation of any particular room environment.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Joe
Last edited by jcfelice88keys (06-02-2010 07:25)
