ChocolateChicken wrote:Fimbulin, I don't quite understand what you were trying to say. Real pianos have a very long decay. Sampled pianos are recorded from real pianos. Why are sampled pianos post processed to have long decay if real pianos already have long decay?
Ah, I was afraid that would come out obscurely. I was stating that from my work with live pianos I know how to generate artificial decay that sounds absolutely real with no artifacting. Since I was working with real notes already sequenced and not individually sampled, I had a slight advantage: I didn't need to pick out a library to use and the piano was not already processed.
If you were a microphone and you were trying to record such a vast array of velocities and decibels, you would find that hearing the quietest vibrations of the strings to be extremely difficult- especially for sustained periods of time. I do believe they raised the noise floor to make the smallest vibrations audible (especially after the sustain became so quiet it is near-literally impossible to hear). That creates the artifacts. It has to do with all the digital recording devices and processing equipment used.
All of that being said, in my post I explained a little bit about how I got around that. I boost my piano, EQ my piano (and still do the same with my sampled piano libraries- my favorite of which has almost no post processing) to make the pianos louder and to rid the track of any artificial noise. Then, instead of super boosting the low volume sustains (after about six to ten seconds sustains are REALLY hard to hear on almost any recording) to make it audible (which would require more EQ'ing and work to make it sound OK, but the whole time you are also EQing out some natural piano sound) I add my own custom reverb patch that emulates string vibrations. The reverb patch sounds real, and it can be adjusted to make the pianos seem to have 20+ seconds of natural sounding decay.
I might be a noob at explaining things, but this worked excellently for me and continues to be the best method I have found for maximum realism in piano libraries.
What I look for in piano libraries:
Natural sounding note velocity changes.
As many different velocity samples per note as possible.
As many round robins as possible for each group of velocity samples.
Natural sounding resonance.
As little processing as possible on the samples.
One thing I wish that someone had with their piano library:
If a note is pressed then the next sample played should not resonate the same way as if the note was not pressed. That would make pianos seem VERY realistic because of the overtones and resonances the piano strings have with eachother, but would take an INSANE amount of programming and samples to work.
