"Let it Be": Bluethner sound?

When you play you have to punch the keys the way mccartney does...did...to get that distinct sound.

Here's my soundcloud link to let it be...also did maybe I'm amazed.  Some reason maybe  I'm amazed has a super slow tempo in the recording??

https://soundcloud.com/dayle-spenzer/le...=clipboard

https://soundcloud.com/dayle-spenzer/ma...=clipboard

Hello Nico,

Upon reading your post, I listened to three versions of Paul McCartney performing 'Let It Be' on youtube, and noticed some weird anomalies about his piano's sound in this recording.  Even the 2009 "remastered" version contains some of these strange anomalies to the mix.  Are you sure you wish to recreate this electronically manipulated version of the Bluethner piano?

Firstly, the piano's dynamic range is extremely heavily compressed.  I emulate that extreme compression by guess-setting the dynamic range by ear of Bluethner Model One AB to a mere 5-6dB! (yes, 5-6dB; not a typographic error).  Notice, when McCartney plays the piano solo introduction, he accents the third beat in the right hand:  the piano responds by getting noticeably brighter, yet gets only slightly louder.  The slight increase in loudness does not correspond to the comparatively larger increase in brightness.  This is an artifact of deliberate heavy compression.

Aside:  Although not part of this discussion, I notice the same compression artifact when I hear trumpets' sounds blaring with overtones, yet their overall volumes do not correspond to the bright brassiness of the sound. (End aside.)

Then, when McCartney starts to sing, the piano is wayyyyy, wayyy too quiet in the background (yet still with that brightness of much louder playing), so as to enable his voice to be heard.  Since when does a singer's voice totally dominate the sound of a bright sounding Bluethner concert grand ... UNLESS heavy compression was used, and two separate microphone settings were used for the singer and the piano?  I generally have high regard for George Martin's mixing technique, but here the electronic manipulation of the piano and voice via heavy compression and level mismatching makes it nearly impossible to copy that sound in anything representing a real instrument.  Hence, I simply dropped the dynamic range slider to less than 10dB, and left everything else practically untouched. 

Try listening to Paul McCartney singing Let It Be, and let me notice if you perceive what I hear.

Cheers,

Joe

Not just the Fairchild, it’s the entire chain of analog (and very non-transparent) gear through which the piano, and everything else, was recorded and mixed (microphones, pre-amps, console, EQ’s, tape, various processors, …), which makes emulating the “Let It Be” sound with Pianoteq (or any other virtual Bluthner) an impossibility.
Even if Pianoteq were able to nail the naked, natural sound of the instrument perfectly, and I don’t think it can because the original seems to resonate in a very unique way, you’d still be short all that warm “non-linear” texture which is added by the equipment and is essential to the character of what we now immediately recognize as the “Let It Be” pianosound.

I’ve been having a go at this a few times these past few days — with just Pianoteq and no other processing — but I never managed anything closer than a very vague “Ah, you’re trying to do the ‘Let It Be’ sound, aren’t you?” sort of thing. In other words: no success at all.
(The closest I got, but still nowhere near good enough I thought, was with three instances of Pianoteq: one for the left hand (EQ’ed differently than the right hand), one for the right hand, and a third one for just for the note E3.)

The first hurdle is to get a strong mono sound with Pianoteq’s Bluthner. Which is not a given. (The piano on the record sounds mono to me, it’s the reverb that fills the stereo image.) The second obstacle is to improve the timbre of that all-important E3 note (which is unfortunately not the best-sounding of Pianoteq’s Bluthner notes, and neither is A2 — well, not for “Let It Be” anyway).
Then you have to find the perfect balance between the dynamics of the instrument plus its according colour differentiations, on the one hand, and the effect the compressor has on those dynamics, on the other. Again: anything but an easy task. Because, despite its solemn character, the piano on “Let It Be” is played surprisingly forcefully and the sound is quite punchy, yet always warm, round and mellow too. But play like that on any of Pianoteq’s Bluthner presets with default settings (and even with a compressor engaged) and you get a sound that’s just not right for “Let It Be”.
And if all that isn’t challenging enough already — and I haven’t even mentioned countless little but important tweaks of the Cutoff, Impedance, Sympathetic Resonances, Direct Sound Duration, Hammer Noise, Unison Width, Blooming Energy, etc. ... not forgetting the FX settings, … — you then also have to somehow recreate the reverberation (another essential ingredient of the total sound) which, like I said, fills the stereo field very differently than the piano itself does. You can hear this difference much more pronounced in the 2021 Deluxe remix.

I don’t think it is too difficult to create something very-broad-ballpark “Let It Be”-ish with Pianoteq’s Bluthner, something that will offend no one in the audience, but anything more accurate than that is, I fear, out of the question. Certainly if you’re going to limit yourself to just Pianoteq and use no other processing.

_