Steinway Grand Piano Sound
Grethe Presnar
I taught a music production class at Mediatech for close to 5 years. I spent most of my free moments at this piano. I focused on trying to make the sound as tight and warm as possible. The microphones were placed close to the soundboard and more attention was paid to the quieter velocity samples.
Jon's Steinway is nothing if not an honest, simple-to-use, sampled piano. The velocity layers add plenty of finesse and the recorded mechanical sounds of the keys and pedals add to the authenticity. It's a delight to play as a solo instrument.
This is a five-star piano! I really like the character of this piano, the great sound recording, and the overall well-balanced sound. Since it was released this piano has been part of my template. It's also light on CPU and it's very recommended if you're composing on an old laptop like mine.
This is really a premium Steinway Grand Piano library for free. It sounds really full and warm and is a joy to play. The four velocity layers are very responsive and allow for expressive playing. Jon has done a fantastic job with this and I highly recommend it for everyone who needs a nice Grand Piano.
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Learning more about the Steinway sound is important, as reading about it and experiencing it in an Authorized Steinway Dealer piano store will help you decide if one of the Steinway Family pianos is for you.
Today, Lang Lang is an international piano superstar, one that was sought out by Steinway to help design the limited edition Black Diamond Model D. For Lang Lang, it all comes back to that same Steinway sound he fell in love with as a child.
"I think generations of pianists' muscular-nervous systems have been shaped by how the action feels and how the action and the sound merge into this playing experience," says Gerstein. "And for the listeners, it's this experience of listening to the Steinway sound that has really cultivated what we think the piano sound is."
Steinway introduced the Hexagrip Pinblock in 1963, a breakthrough that enabled pianos to hold their tuning longer and with great precision. The exclusive design provides the tuning pin with smoother movement under torque, a more uniform retaining action, and a piano that holds its tuning longer.
Steinway constructs its soundboard bridges from vertically laminated hardwood with a horizontal grain, capped with solid maple. Each Steinway bridge is notched by hand for precise, individual string-bearing, another advantage to a handcrafted piano.
This design ensures optimal sound transmission from the strings to the soundboard. It also allows for the instantaneous transfer of the vibrations of some 233 strings throughout the bridge and the soundboard, creating more colors to the Steinway palette.
The use of Hard Rock Maple in Steinway-designed pianos produces a key difference in their sound. Boston pianos use the same kind of Hard Rock Maple used in Steinways for their inner rim. The result is more sound projection and less rim sound diffusion compared to the Kawai.
In contrast, Steinway-designed pianos have a tone that is known for its warmth, longer sustaining tone, and greater dynamic range. This tone is distinctive, quite different from Yamaha and Kawai models.
Our seasoned piano consultants can answer any questions after you sample several Steinway models, listening for that famous, warm, bell-like Steinway sound. It is a sound that inspires pianists to play at their best.
Set up an appointment at your next convenience. In the meantime, learn more about the yearlong process that goes into every handcrafted Steinway. This article will help illustrate the highest grade of materials and handcrafted efforts that go into making the Steinway sound.
I would like to my midi in Garageband sound like a real piano .I'm using the Steinway Grand Piano in the library, but it has no intonation and depth.I tried adding some plug-ins and tuning hyperparameters but still, it sounds very midi-generated.
What @Tetsujin is hinting at is: getting a "human" feel is probably not going to be about any setting so much as the control of the notes themselves. In a human performance, in most genres, hardly ever will any two consecutive notes be the same volume (in MIDI terms, "velocity"). The performer will make expressive choices to get louder and softer over time, or when playing simultaneous notes, to make certain ones louder than others. They will also expressively vary the note duration: A quarter note does not mean releasing the key after exactly one beat; it may be much less (staccato), or could overlap the next note by a tiny bit.
To use a metaphor: If you're trying to use a computerized text-to-speech app to create spoken poetry, then if it doesn't sound human, the problem is not necessarily that you need a better sample of a human voice, or that the voice needs to be "tuned." It's that we vary every syllable in pitch inflection and emphasis to convey meaning. The classic stereotypical "robot voice" is all about making the pitch and emphasis of all syllables neutral. To make matters harder, these variances are systematic; if you were to just vary the inflection of your speech synthesis randomly it might sound even more bizarre. Certain speech patterns convey certain meanings; we learn them organically, and to spell them out in detail would be a big task.
Similarly, programming an "expressive, human" performance from scratch is a big job. It means fiddling with the velocity and duration of every note, and it means having some intuitive sense of where the music should get louder, softer, more sustained or more detached. That's why, even with MIDI data, it's easiest to input a live performance and then edit as needed. If that isn't feasible for your purposes, you might want to have a pianist audio-record the music as a guide to you.
A piano with a unique voice of its own. A voice that immediately sweetens the ear and grabs the heart. From the softest stroke of silk to the hammering hands of a rockstar. A voice that sounds mature. Like a perfectly aged singer.
Easy, right? We traveled to all the major Piano stores in the greater San Francisco Bay Area and audited over 400 grand pianos. We tried them all. The big, modern, opulent grands. Exotic Pianos. Vintage pianos. The small and intimate felt uprights.
But it all culminated on the third cellar floor of the San Francisco Steinway store. An old, brown vintage Steinway from 1928 that was protected under a thick dust cover. It was dusty and forgotten, but the piano caretaker had to keep tuning because he loved it so much.
He answered: " ... Because it is brown. 95% of people don't purchase pianos to play them. They purchase them as furniture ..."
We proceeded to ask: "Why does it sound so rich and soulful?"
He answered: " ... Because it still has the original strings from 1928. The strings have aged like a really fine wine. Consider yourself lucky! ..."
And we hope it makes you feel lucky too.
The 1928 Grand Piano is free and comes together with our free Soundpaint engine. We feel the 1928 is the perfect demonstration of the Soundpaint Engine Technology and lets you feel the power of real-time rendering and velocity morphed samples.
You could also experiment with using only one of the two channels: only left, or only right. It's going to be unbalanced only if you play extreme low or high notes, in which case you could first use Erik's trick to narrow down the stereo, then use only the left or right from the resulting narrowed stereo image.
I was going to write the same as David, he beat me . But I understand you don't actually convert these samples to mono, you just want to hear how your piece would sound on a mono system. Two good things to do:
* Don't A/B stereo / mono, instead load a (professionally released) reference piano piece you think sounds great (on you standard system), and A/B your piece to that one, both in mono. This will tell you much more about how far you are from what a professionally released piano piece can achieve (in mono).
* Test other patches (factory like Yamaha Grand, Bosendorfer Grand, or 3rd-party ones if you have some) on your piece, so see if they would "enhance" the resulting sound (in mono) and get you closer to your reference material (in mono as well). I love the Steinway and have used it on a number of occasions so I would not necessarily discard it, but such decisions are often a matter of trade-off, and, if you really need your piece to sound good (or better than current) in mono, you'll have to trade that off against something you were hearing in stereo, and that you have to change...
Another approach is to use Logic's EQ in Side mode to cut the frequencies where the loss in mono is most noticeable (probably in the lows to low mids). Experimenting with a high pass at a 6 -12 dB slope would be a quick starting point (but a shelf or bell will be more targeted). Doing this has the effect of monoing the lower frequencies, while retaining the spacial information in the highs, resulting in a less dramatic difference between when listening in stereo or mono.
(Tip: Placing a Gain plugin after the EQ and flipping either the L or R channel, will allow you to monitor just the side signal, to hear exactly how it is being affected by the side EQ. Of course you will need to bypass the Gain plugin once you are done)
The 1928 Scoring Piano contains over 11,000 samples and two different microphone perspectives, including a Close Microphone and Player Microphone, which was a mix of 8 Neumann Microphones run through a NEVE console. The close position consists of microphones close to the soundboard of the piano, highly intimate and with a clear sensation of the resonance.
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