I am so loving the Accurate Salamander Grand Piano package that was added fairly recently. I used sooper looper to record a controlling bongo drum track, then live recorded two tracks plus a coda and played over them to do this rendition of “Autumn Leaves” (tis the season).
The piano sounds so nice, you don’t need any other instruments!
Thanks to everyone in the Zynthian-verse who are always making this better and better!
As always you do, super fine stuff, @tkc !
With your permission, i would add it to the list of audio demos in the zynthian website.
Thanks!
Sure @jofemodo, please go ahead!
Thanks so much for this now easy accessible brilliant sounding piano. Wonderful sound!
Accurate Salamander Grand Live should be identical to Zynthian Salamander Grand.
Actually, that’s not quite accurate. The Zynthian version of Accurate Salamander Grand is probably not the latest. So, the correct statement should be “Zynthian Salamander Grand should be identical to Accurate Salamander Grand 6.2beta2.”
I plan to update Zynthian Salamander Grand to the very recent small update to Accurate Salamander Grand, which I think is called 6.2a. The only difference should be improvements in latency (less variation.) The latency issues of earlier versions of Salamander Grand were mostly fixed in version 6-something.
Anyway, please compare Accurate Salamander Grand with Zynthian Salamander Grand, and LMK what you think.
Thanks!
FYI, the changes for the Zynthian version are encoding in efficient lossless FLAC to reduce filespace usage, and simplifying the SFZ code. Also, release is handled differently, with longer release times for lower notes, versus the original same release for all notes, but controllable by CC.
Just updated my Zynthian V4 to Vangelis and I am seeing two versions of Accurate Salamander Grand Piano in the packages section of the webconf. One is labelled “Accurate Salamander Grand for Zynthian” (installed) and the other “Accurate Salamander Grand Piano”. The installed version is smaller (220Mb vs 1.3Gb) so is there any advantage in replacing it with the larger version? Does the FLAC compression give the same quality in a smaller package?
Good questions. I should clarify this in the For Zynthian info.
The “Accurate Salamander Grand Piano” package existed originally.
I took the same source (though perhaps a different version – I need to check which version the original package used) and reduced the size dramatically without sacrificing any meaningful fidelity, and adjusted some controls to work better. I’ve been in contact with the originator of Accurate Salamander Grand and we’ve both learned a lot from each others’ perspectives.
The “for zynthian” package should be functionally equivalent (with some minor changes in some controls and improved release behavior) to the original (except, as I mentioned, the specific version.)
The “for zynthian” package used what was then the most recent version of ASG, which was 6.2beta2. There is now a 6.2a version, which has further improved latency, which was already improved dramatically in 6.2beta2.
I didn’t want to replace the original package, in case I muffed anything, or in case anyone wanted the original package for any reason.
I recommend using the “for zynthian” package. I also recommend, for anyone who’s nerd enough to enjoy doing it, comparing the two and letting me know if anything in the “for zynthian” package isn’t as good or better than the original one.
I do plan to update the “for zynthian” package based on 6.2a, though I doubt anyone will notice the differences. It will also be slightly smaller.
Find more details here: GitHub - jlearman/zynthian-salamander-grand: Accurate Salamander Grand for Zynthian · GitHub
Please LMK what I could make clearer in the package info shown by Webconf. It begins with the same text as the original, followed by this:
This version was tailored for Zynthian by converting (normalized) samples to 16 bits and using FLAC lossless compression. Hammer noise, release samples, and resonance samples are all retained. Half-pedaling is enabled, and release time is set to a curve simulating a grand piano.
It’s not clear, but it looks like the original package is V6.1a. To see the changelog, see
or install the package and on Zynthian look at the readme files in /zynthian/zynthian-data/soundfonts/sfz/Pianos/Accurate Salamander .
