How to get a great piano

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Fri May 24, 2002 6:24 am

Tips anyone?
Using the STS 4000, a great sample cd (suggestions welcome) and what now?
How do get that warm jazzy piano sound?

wayne · Post by **wayne** » Fri May 24, 2002 8:18 am

I like this one

you may want to look at this after - http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... orum=20&15 - you will need to convert the Steinway, perhaps

[ This Message was edited by: wayne on 2002-05-24 09:25 ]

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Fri May 24, 2002 10:31 am

By "convert" you mean...?
And what about EQ and Reverbs? Is anything additional to a good sample needed?

wayne · Post by **wayne** » Fri May 24, 2002 7:45 pm

Sorry, Adi, I'll elaborate.
These Akai programs must be translated to sts format to be used. I use Awave, but I'm looking into ChickenSystems Translator - look here http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 4&forum=20

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Fri May 24, 2002 10:32 pm

Man! You're great. Thanks.

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Fri May 24, 2002 11:57 pm

What about cdXtract?

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat May 25, 2002 1:09 am

This is the 256MB steinway right? It's very dynamic so be careful. It's VERY hard to make it work in a mix.

Anyway, I don't think cdXtract worked for this specific program. Get the sts version here

72MB version
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/stsfiles/steinway72.rar
and the 256MB version
http://www.iface.ne.jp/~ken/stsfiles/steinway256.rar

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Sat May 25, 2002 2:07 am

Hey, This is the most friendly forum I've been to...

hat about the sound angle? What do you guys do with EQ and effects (?) to make the piano sound nice and real?

wayne · Post by **wayne** » Sat May 25, 2002 2:29 am

It's always near-impossible to re-create a real instrument, IMHO, but Paul Tanti's reverbs are very highly regarded around here ( http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 4&forum=16 4free demo) as are ears

And welcome to a fatrockin' forum

BTW, PT reverbs use quite a bit of DSP juice, rightly so

[ This Message was edited by: wayne on 2002-05-25 03:34 ]

jupiter8 · Post by **jupiter8** » Sat May 25, 2002 3:05 am

It is kind of hard to know what sound you are after.
A jazzy feel means different things to differrent people.
A few suggestions to try to make it sound like it is coming from a really old jazz record.
Take away some treble, old jazz records don't have much treble. This, applied corrctly should also help with "warmth"

OVERDRIVE!!!!
But subtly. Apply some soft overdrive to emulate the old record sound.

And last you can try some detuning as well to emulate the old out of tune pianos.

This might not be the sound your after but giv it a try.
And while your at it. Why not some turntable needle noise. Can work in the right context.

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Sat May 25, 2002 3:30 am

Using 2 layers of reverb sometimes does the trick too. Teeny tiny room rev+large hall reverb. Point is, the teeny tiny reverb is supposed to be the board (piano body, whatever it's called) resonation. Wouldn't call it perfect, but workable. Good luck. Rock on!

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Sat May 25, 2002 4:02 am

The double reverb sounds very interesting indeed, and JUPITER8 - I am looking for a warm feeling but a trendy record like sound.
One more thing - somehow the "smaller is better" attitude seems to work.
About translating programs: neither cdxtract nor chicken translator seem to recognise the .akp files I downloaded...

wayne · Post by **wayne** » Sat May 25, 2002 5:43 am

try awave studio demo here http://www.fmjsoft.com/

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Sat May 25, 2002 5:58 am

Hey Wayne, I'm sorry for being such a novice,
but what format should I choose to convert to? I'm trully at a loss looking at all these different formats...

jupiter8 · Post by **jupiter8** » Sat May 25, 2002 6:45 am

1. Creamware STS (.sts)
2. AKAI S 1000 (.p)
3. Soundfont (.sf2)

If there is alt.1 (unusual) use that otherwise alt. 2.
If none of the above is available try with alt.3

This is the general rule.
I don't think Awave supports the STS serie so try with AKAI S 1000.

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Sun May 26, 2002 12:33 am

Does STS play just mono samples?
OR - how do you make mono pianos widen their sounds?

eliam · Post by **eliam** » Tue May 28, 2002 3:59 pm

A friend and I just bought an interesting piano samples CD, which comes in giga format only. It is called "Bosendorfer imperial grand". It sounds great, but if you want to use it on non-giga platforms, you'll have to adapt the 4 stereo layers to fit your needs. The program takes 1.5 giga bytes. Details at http://www.bardstownaudio.com. Also check the "Post grandioso" Steinway.

[ This Message was edited by: eliam on 2002-05-28 17:55 ]

Adi Soffer · Post by **Adi Soffer** » Tue May 28, 2002 10:36 pm

Hey eliam, plese elaborate on: "you'll have to adapt the 4 stereo layers to fit your needs".
The same applies to my Prosonus Grand Steinway CD, and I have the embarassing feeling I do not do it quite right...

thanks,
Soffer

eliam · Post by **eliam** » Thu May 30, 2002 9:27 pm

Actually, my friend with whom I bought this piano library has an e-mu 6400 with 128 megs of RAM. So, to use the samples from the 1.5 gig program, he has to compress it a little...! He won't use stereo samples, of course, so it cuts the 1.5 gigs in half. Also, he does a cleaning work, which is necessary anyway (even if he would use gigasampler) to have a more homogenous result. By cleaning, I mean getting rid of samples which are out of context. On the p velocity, it represents about 1/5 of the 88 samples. After that, he will reduce more and more the number and/or lenght of the sounds and end up with a few versions of the Bosendorfer imperial grand which will fit in his 128 megs of ram and even permit some other instruments to play along.

For that purpose we had to convert the .gig file into e-mu format on a scsi drive so that his sampler could access the data.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Sat Jun 08, 2002 12:46 pm

Kensuguru your pianos sound very muffled compared to the gigapiano.