Very humbly I take the liberty of publishing this test for piano lovers. Midi track (on the fly) first reproduced with KeyScape (Omnisphere) using what for me remains the most beautiful piano sound ever, namely the Yamaha C7. The second demo is PianoteQ which uses the Steinway Model D jazz.
The difficult decision is yours… remembering that Keyscape (samples) weighs 77Gb while PianoteQ (audio models) are only hundreds of Mb.
I tried to highlight the dynamics on the bass and treble and use the sustain pedal a lot to see how much the notes got mixed up…
To avoid burdening the forum I used MP3 so the original sound worsens in this format…
Forgive my execution…
KeyScape: C7 Yamaha
PianoteQ 8: Steinway mod D jazz
All played with semi-weighted M-Audio MasterKeyboard.
I’ve tried many virtual pianos, and the Keyscape LA Custom Grand & Rhodes (as well as NI’s Noire Felt) remain my favorites by far. Such a thick, warm and versatile sound <3
The Giant by NI is also pretty great, with a very unique sound
Hint: Spectrasonics explicitly allows sampling your Spectrasonic instruments for personal use. There’s some free SFZ autosamplers out there
Doesn’t come close to the original’s authenticity of course, but with some tweaking, pedal noises etc it sounds better than any other SFZ piano I’ve heard ^^
I am not a good pianist, but in all these years I have missed a beautiful sound, but above all the behavior of the sound with respect to fingering. I think that my best piano (before discovering virtual instruments) was the Yamaha CP70b which I sold many years ago in the dark period in which I switched to trumpet and sax, switching from bass and classical guitar (thus losing years of piano study ). Now with these VSTs it’s a dream…
This is the penultimate piano that I put in this post. The Giant.
The midi file is always the same and with this instrument the most “beaten” parts go into distortion…
I don’t have so many options to compare by here, but i totally agree in that Pianoteq is the more playable virtual piano i’ve played with. It’s very responsive and dynamics & resonances are credible and rich. Perhaps the sound is not an “exact copy” of any real piano, but sincerely, i don’t care about this. I never played a real SteinweyD. For me, a modest home-player, the more important thing is playability, that is huge. Sound has character and complexity, good enough for me.
My friend (graduated in piano at the Conservatory and many Jazz courses) who made me try PianoteQ (which I then bought), made me try Grand Rhapsody by Waves (Fazioli Piano)… a lot of GB and thousands of settings for about 35 Euro… Nice but in my opinion PianoteQ remains (in my hands) the best.
You can change the type of microphones (up to 3 pairs) and also insert microphones that “feel” the hands on the keys…I don’t hear any latency using my iMac and Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 sound card.
