An Honest Opinion About Logic's New Pianos From A Pianist Perspective

[Dave Leo Baker]

I’ve had a couple people ask what I think of Apple’s new pianos. Truth be told, I spend so much time in Pianoteq I hadn’t really looked. TLDR / tiktok version: for most people they are more than good enough. If I had no money for Pianoteq these instruments can absolutely produce great piano work from rock to pop to ballad / cinematic, even more modern New Age. 

I’m biased: I love the piano as an instrument. anymore when playing out, I’m likely to be at a performing arts center or somewhere else with a acoustic piano rather than drag along gear, save the drones and Eastern instruments for the studio. So I love Pianoteq’s commitment to the original manufacturers and modeling according to their specs. I love how Pianoteq implements the pianissimo (soft) and sostenuto  pedals. All that to fully disclose my bias, and here’s where I leave Pianoteq behind. To use pianoteq you need to be a pianist and understand things like opening the lid, what kind of hall a particular piano would sound good in, etc etc.

Even Chopin understood the difference between the piano of the instrumental pianist and the singer songwriter. His lover / admirer Pauline Viardot García, who played and sang at his deathbed, had complained to him that her piano technique was nothing like his. In true flowery fashion of the letters of those times, Chopin basically said, “You’re a singer songwriter. You can play and sing at the same tine. So what else do you want?” As a Chopin admirer for decades, and also someone who doesn’t sing, I agree with him. And Apple has made this very approachable with these new pianos. No weird velocity or octave breaks, no “that sounds like a sampled piano” stuff here. I did test them using long scale / arpeggio passages, but I did so with simple ballad chords and arpeggios. 

If you’re just playing and singing, or session-dropping accompaniments and chords, these pianos will do you right. If you are learning technique, smoothing your scales / passages, voicing full chords etc., you get to hear and correct your mistakes with the tone of the instrument, unlike a lot of sampled instruments. 

Now let’s look at Apple’s pianos. No longer just a sampler instrument, Apple has what looks to me like a cross between a model and samples. Historically, true pianos have been insanely hard to do on electronic keyboard instruments beyond pop and maybe fusion jazz use, but Apple’s instrument really comes through here. I tested with the instruments both dry and wet, and while piano purists (myself included) can get itchy about instruments that show a lot of effects in the chain, “masking” that acoustically pure sound, I think Apple has got it right here. The pianos as they are in the library just work, certainly you can tweak and do more in the piano instrument and with the added effects. But the effects do create the spaces the piano goes with and shape the sound to the genre. Software like Pianoteq can come off as more demanding to a producer who’s not familiar with the what and why of pianos and sound boards, string length, and why you get squeezed sounds with the lid shut / big booming concerts sounds with it open.

Apple has been that group of engineers when I was a young player, who would be running around with the mics and equipment just to get the grand piano miced up in the studio or the live concert hall. Inside the piano instrument you can control the key noise (both hammer and damper) and the pedal noise. These are small things that most digital pianos have historically not had, or had in such exagerated fashion it wasn’t always that realistic. 

It would be nice if hammer vs damper noise was separated but again most people don’t notice stuff like that, and that doesn’t set you back in a live or studio context.

Unfortunately these don’t have a lid setting, my guess is as you select your instruments it compensates. I’ve only auditioned what’s in the library.

When I bypass all the plugins and dry out the sound completely, it’s not glitchy like you get with sampled pianos. So there’s even curve from piano if not pianissimo to fortissimo, very loud. 

I do think it would have helped for them to include a lid setting and to have the soft pedal respond like Pianoteq does. Sostenuto’s  not important, I can count on one hand where I have used that pedal in live performances. 

This is just a rough cut from my auditioning these instruments this morning. But I’m very impressed with what Apple’s doing here. Of course I will personally always use Pianoteq because reasons. But with these pianos, you don’t need to ask the questions about hall placement, or worry about lid position, etc. Concert Grand is good enough for your kid’s piano competition or recital so long as the work doesn’t contain pianissimo, and more than adequate for jazz, new age, pop and more. All of the other pianos really do fit their genres. Many of them do use the sympathetic resonances which before I had only seen really well done by Pianoteq. These are when you pedal down and play a note, and the relative harmonics play on other strings. Those sympathetic resonances do a lot more, but they are what adds richness, texture and color that makes our instrument what it is. Even the weird “worn out” effects of vintage not-quite-restored instruments in famous bars and clubs. They don’t let us control the unisons — the tuning of the multiple strings for each note - but I suspect they’re compensating with some of their effects in the chain on pianos like Grandma’s piano.  

If I had not invested in Pianoteq and had no money to buy it, I could absolutely record and perform with these instruments, even without the pianissimo pedal. I think a very many great competent people will do so. Those of us who grew up on, and were trained with, acoustic pianos will always find our way to places like Pianoteq. but in a very modern songwriting context where so often some of the acoustic instrument dynamics get compressed out of mixes, what more would you need than these? Certainly anything from Elton John to Billy Joel to Adele to  Sarah McLachlan to Fiona Apple to Tori Amos and Cody Fry, all these styles and more you could play with the Apple supplied pianos, and not have to fiddle fuss over lid position and what halls will best suit it. certainly they sit nicely in any number of the Space Designer halls and rooms, but the effects on most of them already take care of what you’d need in a typical singer songwriter context, where the piano is the canvas, your vocals the painting.

Yes, I was very pleasantly surprised. This comes from someone who uses all the pedal configurations from Pianoteq on a ton of their instruments. But I’m a piano guy. Most people will want to include piano as part of the support to their song, and these Apple instruments, supported by their Piano emulator, work very nicely for a good many things.

Cheers, and hope this helps someone,

Dave Leo Baker,
Your Spa Productions
Gentle rain for thirsty souls
https:artist.link/daveleobaker

[Kevin Gibbs]

Never tried Pusnotek,  did you ever try Ivory?

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 6, 2026, at 11:21 AM, Dave Leo Baker <davele...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Dave Leo Baker]

I have not. I had followed Pianoteq for years but it wasn’t really accessible on the mac, not within its editor where you expose all the presets for each manufacturer. I was attracted to Pianoteq because of its collaboration with some of my fav European piano manufacturers, and we’re talking lots of pre-piano instruments as well. If you use Ivory, perhaps you can do a side by side between Ivory and Apple’s stock new instruments. I just get asked, in and out of the blind community, about “should I invest in Pianoteq.” I can now say with a clear conscience, not if you use Logic, unless you are an acoustic piano performer wanting to digitize. Anything I have done commercially as part of contracts for ads, audio logos for Youtube, etc., I could have done the piano parts with Apple. we’re talking bed stuff, not high-end piano performance for a Performing Arts Center with grant money paying for your concert. That would be Pianoteq if not the real thing acoustically. But if you’re doing piano music for people’s Tiktok / Youtube / corporate training content, you have everything you need for cross genre performances. Obviously way more, but from where I sit, Apple Piano stands to serve way more than it doesn’t. If you use Ivory, I’d be interested in how you feel about Apple’s pianos by comparison. I’m not sure this is the place though to compare Ivory and Pianoteq, there’s plenty of piano ’snob’ places where I know I’ve spent too much time waxing eloquent on small things most people don’t notice. If you’re used to Apple’s experience though, Apple’s pianos don’t have any parameters that would throw you off. There’s no context help with the VO shift H, but I think most people either know what they want to adjust, will play with things and see how it sounds, or just use the presets by selecting one at the top, the popup button where you can select a piano. the library options sculpt good piano / environment / recordings settings to start with for most things, IMHO.

Dave 

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[Kevin Gibbs]

Dave,

 I am not really a Logic guy.  Further, for the work that ever really counted in my pro life, I ONLY, (all caps,)) used honest to God Steinways.  I started out with Cakewalk/Sonar and then moved to Reaper.  I have Logic, because I left the Windows universe generally in favor of Mac and bought Logic when I bought a maxed out M1 five years ago.  Reaper is accessible one Mac and that’s where I am in practice.    

I’ve used ivory, because I was impressed by them at a NAMM show, years back.  It wasn’t accessible then.  But I have since accidentally discovered a way to make all its presets NKS.  

I use fake piano just to sketch.  I never use fake piano in real life.  I’m still waiting to hear back from Apple about the disposition of the legacy instrumentsthat appear to have been lost to most of us.  I’m doing it just to be anal, not because I truly care or need them.  Once that’s resolved and I upgrade to 12, I may look into the comparison if I have nothing else to doo, but I  wouldn’t hold my breath as it is nowhere near a priority.

  

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[Dave Leo Baker]

well may your chosen gods smile upon  you for having worked with Cakewalk and Sonar back in the day. I admit I missed all that because I was out of the music world for a couple of decades. But I kind of agree with what I’ve heard: most of what we have now accessibility wise is in no small part due to the accessibility work, and the users of, those older software packages. Call it accessibility influences if you want, but that’s how I feel, having come back in in time for Logic 10.5. And I know quite a few studios who are picking up Reaper now, something that even a couple years ago was the domain of primarily beatmakers and rappers. I’m going out on a limb and guessing, but I’d bet if you open Garage Band and let it download all the latest sounds, you might get some nice surprises in Reaper if they just read from the default plugin locations.

But again thanks for having put up with the inaccessibility and issues back in the day with Cakewalk, Sonar, etc. I’m aware many were out gigging with this gear too, and my sincere appreciation for having kind of set the standard for how things could work for those of us who came back later, or were just born to it later. 

we stand on the shoulders of giants,

Dave

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