My History With Piano Sounds
As a pianist of some 35 years now I have owned and played some lovely pianos. I have also played some bad ones, but that´s another story – suffice to say, I have done my apprenticeship and think I have a fair idea on how a nice piano should sound.
Tthere is nothing to get a debate heated like omitting to set out some ground rules for discussion. “MY” definition of a piano sound here is an equally tempered modern instrument, the likes of which we are accustomed to hearing in modern music from the earliest recordings until now and excludes other tuning temperaments. One can argue all day and night about the personal preferences of Elton John or Billy Joel, but we´re not here for that. I just want to talk about the use of piano sounds in a midi or VST instrument (via midi input of course) environment to be used in todays music whatever the style.
So, where to start? I am a bit biased towards the school of thought that wherever possible it is always better to have a pianist play a real piano in a nice room with some nice mics. But thats a practical impossibility for 90% of us. From the pianists point of view this is by far the best thing you can do to get the best performance from him/her. There is something so special about feeling the vibration of the strings in your forearms and shoulders and having complete control over the dynamics, at least as far as your technique will allow. Also the pedals react differently because they are, like the keys, not just switches. But there are drawbacks. One of which is that the piano will need to be tuned professionaly, and mic´ed properly. It should also ideally be in a physical situation allowing it to being played without external sounds leaking into the mics. Where this situation does not exist we have to fall back on compromises, but as time has advanced so has technology and in terms of modern music, be it jazz or pop or even rock, the alternatives are not that bad. In some cases they are even better than the real thing, but lets not get controversial too early on.
So lets have a wee history of the piano as a mobile instrument as far as my memory will allow. My first “Piano Sound” that wasn´t a real piano came on an Italian home organ I used to cart around to gigs. It was a tab that read “piano” that when pressed and notes subsequently played bore no relation to any piano that I had heard before. It was essentially a sine or square wave with a bit of decay, sustain and release thrown in. It sounded different to the organ sound certainly and from that respect it at least offered an alternative, but sounded as much like a piano as an oboe does a kick drum. The Fender Rhodes existed but was quite heavy to cart around and for me was never intended to replace the piano so it never really interested me until later on. My next recollection of a piano alternative was a machine made by GEM (Italian again I think, i´ll research and report) called the “Insta-Piano” and this was a step forward but still an analogue attempt to simulate the waveform and envelope characteristics without actually getting that close to the actual timbre. Unless I am mistaken, and you must forgive my failing memory, I don´t even think it was sensitive to touch. Its sound can be heard peppering the album "Signing On", UB40s first commercial album. Listen to it and the out of time Wem Copycat tape delay unit on the intro to "King" to hear just how far away from a piano it sounded.
A few years passed and I joined a gigging band and the demand for a real piano sound became more crucial but still there were not that many products to choose from. I had a synthesizer (I have no recollection of the name) that had a 3 way splittable keyboard, bass at the left, piano in the middle and a mono synth at the top. When used in single mode this became my piano sound for a couple of years. It was touch sensitive, though hard to play quietly, and in the context of an early 80s rock band where volume was king and subtlety not required, it was fine. (I wish I could remember the name but even googling obscure synthesizers of the 70´s didn´t throw anything up. I´ll keep on looking and update if I find it.)
We had now entered the heady days of midi and things were starting to happen. The Yamaha DX7 hit the scene after a raft of Korg and Roland analogue polyphonic monsters had settled into the modern day sound. The DX7 was different in many aspects and not just its clinical digital sound. It still struggled to emulate a piano, but it did bring to fame its own piano sound which in turn sparked a number of hit tunes. This gave me hope at least that if piano technique was still alive, then there would still be someone trying to get that elusive sound out into a portable keyboard. Around this time also there were the beginnings of the early samplers. A promising proposition but still way out of the league of your average Joe like me, with a Fairlight costing about the same as a house.
Eventually I got my foot on the sampling ladder with an Ensoniq Mirage. Now it was getting exciting, because this baby came with a set of floppy disks and one of them was called “PIANO” and it really was a real piano or at least it was small file sized, low bit rate recordings of one. Not a very good sound to be honest, but for me at the time it was a joy. Even if that first sampled piano of mine wasn´t a full sized 88 note keyboard, it sounded like a piano and from there the future was rosy in my eyes. Then I made the mistake of going into a shop in Portsmouth and set my eyes on a YAMAHA CP70b. A REAL PIANO, a real baby grand piano – made portable by removing all of the middle octaves 3rd strings and shortening all of them. It had a removable harp which made up one box and the keys and hammers folded onto another. Its chromium legs and removable single sustain pedal finished off the look, while pick-ups on each string and EQ and Volume controls took care of the sound. It was wonderful, if not a little too heavy for a band of 4 gigging around Europe in a transit van. It was a lot better suited to a band like Genesis whose music can be heard extolling the virtues of this fantastic instrument and whose roadies were more accustomed to the lugging around of something this big. In the end, very reluctantly, it had to go. By this time technology had come quite a way forward and only a bit of petty snobbery on my part had kept me from exploring the market while I had owned the Yamaha, it was after all a real piano.
I had a listen round to some of the offerings of the early nineties and had to admit, there was some pretty good sounding instruments around and the technology behind them is still now just being refined as memory sizes increase and processors get faster.
I have had very few pianos in the last 18 years or so. I bought a Korg SG1Dx which lasted me almost 12 years. With its touch sensitive, weighted 88 note keyboard it was almost portable for a single person. and while I didn´t always use it as a piano sound, initially I did. It was a great piece of kit – still is – it still works, just isn´t really that road worthy any more, heavy items tend to damage more when dropped and i think it was upwards of 20 kilos. I stayed with Korg and bought an SP200 a few years ago which is still my main piano, and a darn site lighter, though I own a Yamaha home piano as well, which I use for restaurant gigs as its compact and amplified and the wooden surround is a little more aesthetically pleasing in that environment. I am also lucky enough to have the “key” to a rather lovely Yamaha G1 5 foot baby grand that I play twice a week for money, thats my treat! I´m preparing a review of some common piano plugins to follow this article along with some audio demos and samples. If you would like to be alerted to its readiness, please email me through the contact page. If you would like a plugin reviewed contact me at the same place, I´d be happy to do it.
In fact if you have any feed back on how my site is developing please get in touch, any criticism, offers of help, offers of plugins or even plain old money will all help keep the resource growing and helping others to make informed choices.