Topic: Soft Grand Piano sounds
I'm a new user of Pianoteq and I'm amazed how good pianoteq sounds.It took me a lot of time to learn how to modify the sounds to my liking. I really like soft piano sounds (especially that soft grand from Nord is really good). So i've watched some really good tutorials from very technical persons on youtube how to modify the sounds in pianoteq and tried to create my own soft piano sounds.
So now I have a great collection of midnight, intimate and soft piano grands all created to my liking. In the FXP corner I have uploaded my favorite piano sound which is using the NY Steinway.
I've also recorded a demo of it on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck3xmiH1ycY
The method I used for this specific piano sound was:
- lowering the Velocity curve
- changing the Hammer Hardness
- modify the Action parameters
- modify the reverb (although I use a different reverb in the video)
- changed the Microphone setup in such a way that the phase correlation is good
- and most importantly, I've analyzed the Nord Soft Grand sound and transferred that to an EQ profile for this specific sound and modified the three EQ's in this sound to get near to that profile.
During this sound design I've noticed that the Microphone setup is almost the most important part for the end result, it's really fast out of phase, so for me this is the hardest part and would love to have some tips from the experts here how to use microphones for recording piano sounds , I know that there are a few basic setups like the AB, MS, ORTF and XY setups, but maybe there are more common setups to use for recording piano sounds?
I'm in the middle of programming new sounds now for the Steingraeber model. It's my favorite pianoteq model, but I really struggle to have some great soft pianos out of that model, do you have any tips or tricks that you use when creating those soft piano sounds?