New user, piano technician with ProRecord on acoustic grand

Hey Everybody,

New user here, 30 year professional piano technician that worked for several piano stores and did concert and repair/rebuilding work. Been out of the virtual instrument world for a while and was looking around to see what was new and current in the piano emulation department. I have a 1929 Baldwin 'C' 6'3" grand piano that I have rebuilt, new strings, hammers, dampers, action felt, key bushings, the works. I have a Pianodisc ProRecord MIDI module installed on it for quiet time playing that, while a pretty good optical sensor setup that has a decent amount of dynamic control, has absolutely horrible programmed piano patches. So the search was on for a better piano patch to trigger through the MIDI interface.

Tried a few 'virtual pianos' through the MIDI interface to my laptop and some were quite good, but it always came back to my criticism of the piano patch note for note. On many, you can hear when the sample markedly changes after a range of notes, sounding like a different instrument in different tonal regions. Sustain was a weak area on several VSTs as well, harmonics wouldn't blend under full pedal but mush together or worse, trail off prematurely. Note volumes were inconsistent on some patches, dying off in the top treble and booming too much in the bass. Note for note tone could be inconsistent, something I can change on acoustic instruments, not so much on digital ones.

When I came across Pianoteq 8 and found the individual note control, dynamic curve and voicing features... that was it. Search over. This is the stuff I do on acoustic pianos every day... adjusting hammer voicing, balancing tonal response across the instrument, maximizing dynamic response through action part regulation and bringing the tuning/regulation/voicing together to create a complete responsive instrument. Now I can change and adjust this through the interface in minutes, not hours reshaping and needling the felt hammers and dialing in action part adjustments. All at the individual note level, not just changing EQ settings for a section. And I'm narrowly focusing on the piano tone through binaural mode, not even playing with the microphone type and placement features yet.

And the fact it's modelled not sampled means I'm not maxxing out the HDD. Brilliant stuff! Now I need to justify the Pro version over the Standard...

If I have one quibble, it's the interface window,  I can't maximize it to full screen in Windows and enlarging the magnification just cuts off the bottom of the screen. Would like to have a full screen option, unless it's there and I've overlooked it.

Hey Everybody,

New user here, 30 year professional piano technician that worked for several piano stores and did concert and repair/rebuilding work. ...