Soundfont Download Piano
Sasha Stolt
Hi everyone! I'm new to composing and have been starting out by writing for piano. This is a choice driven largely by the fact that I absolutely can't stand the musescore sounds for string instruments!! but anyways, I am not a piano player so I can't play some of the things I've recently written... I would love recommendations of programs I can run a MIDI file through for the most realistic, expressive result!!!! (also if u have any good string programs that would be great too although I feel like that's hard to synthesize accurately honestly almost impossible)
So, I always really enjoyed the Piano soundfont on Musecore 1. Then, I was literally forced to upgrade to Musescore 2 due to some technical difficulties on my computer. I kinda liked the piano soundfont for that, but not as much. Then I was forced to upgrade to Musescore 2.2.1, and I absolutely HATE the piano soundfont. Does anyone have a solution to this problem? A better piano Soundfont? The ORIGIONAL Musescore 1 Soundfont?
I agree, those soundfonts are of the highest quality. I recommend using the Nice Keys plus Steinway font as it seems to be the only piano that will play on every midi file and doesn't seem to be affected by different midi control events other than chorus and reverb.
I did pay for Finale Songwriter, but I'm not happy with its default SoundFont that I ended up making my own, lol. The YDP sounds the most like the $500 Yamaha digital piano that I own that I chose this one.
Me too! I have a Casio PX-750 (whose piano SoundFonts I really like - the organ ones not so much), but your Yamaha SoundFont is excellent. And it's always interesting opening these files in PolyPhone to see what's going on, the complexity is right up there in the design work I think.
You inspired me to look at that soundfont again. I had played around with making my own general midi SF2 and then discovered that was a lot of work that I put it back down for a couple of years. But what I did complete was a General MIDI Piano Category that includes the ALX-YDP Piano, as well as a lot of other presets that I use in my own MIDI sheet music creations.
Old and nice, but it's not that light. It's 25 Mb for 1 piano midi instrument or 25 Mb for 7 piano midi instruments. Musescore playback gets really choppy on my old laptop if I add big soundfont files to it.
LOL, compared to the original sizes, I suppose that is light. But when I'm combining the better piano with other instruments that I want to have in the score, like the better tenor saxophone, the better congas, the better steel string guitar and picked bass, it all adds up and the playback stutter begins. I pare it down wherever I can. That's why the Yamaha piano .SF2 I made ended up at only 8 Mb, a third of the size of the Salamander light.
1) You sampled from a Salamander C-5 grand piano and I was sampling from a Yamaha Digital grand piano (YDP). There are differences in tone right there. Enough said about comparing apples and oranges. Let us distinguish between original instrument quality and soundfont craftsmanship quality now.
2) You had stereo samples to work with. I only had mono samples to work with. Using the exact same .wav sample twice for a left and right speaker does not make it stereo, that just makes it bloated. That's the grief that I had with the original YDP soundfont design that I made my own .SF2 version of it. So I used the panning feature on the instruments section to create that keyboard sound of bass on the left, treble on the right, middle C in the middle for the speakers. The same mono samples are played twice, but with two different sets of pans to create the stereo sound of L and R instruments when you're listening with a headset, the bass a little softer in your right ear than in your left, and gradually getting louder to your right ear as you climb towards middle C. You did not take advantage of panning at all, every stereo sound centered on middle C in your instrument design, relying on the mic pickup to make the stereo.
Only one note ever gets played though (mono on 2-3 hammered strings), and it's two different ears that are hearing it from two different points of view that sound would appear to travel from one side of your head to the other (stereo). Added math weighs nothing. Two mics weigh twice as much in the .wav samples as one. I chose math, you chose mics. If you were in the audience in a concert hall, stereo sound would make no difference to you at all, seated too far away from the piano to notice that the lowest bass is less than four feet further away than the highest treble that a mono version would be fine (What does the audience hear? YDP Mono). When you're seated at the piano, the travelling stereo sound is definitely noticeable (What does the pianist hear? YDP Stereo).
3) You used A and D# for every octave, those two notes getting stretched to cover the full span. I used A, C, D# and F# for every octave because I didn't like the way the two note stretch deformed the sound. I could afford that added weight because I wasn't doubling up on the same note for the stereo R and L .wav samples. You used 30 samples for the piano (15 notes) plus 14 samples for added harmonics. I used 30 samples for the piano (30 notes) and 0 added harmonics. I miss the harmonics, but missing harmonics is the truth of every digital piano I play. If you want to claim that the YDP is a lesser quality piano soundfont for the lack of added harmonic sounds, I'll agree with you there. But I would claim that the YDP is a higher quality soundfont for using 4 unique notes per octave than two.
4) Your .wav sample lengths are significantly longer than mine, and that's where the bulk of the Mb weight comes from. But I would disagree that longer .wav samples equal better. Degradation occurs naturally that an A4 root 69 needs key corrections once the note has been held beyond a certain point. If I'm going to loop a note to be held at that same volume level indefinitely, it's not going to be at the point where the note is already out of tune due to natural wavelength degradation, even if that faded timbre is true to the reality of a live piano. All of your looping .wav samples need key corrections. All of my looping .wav samples are clean.
5) If I was going to be playing music where the piano note was held for more than two full measures, or if the grand piano was playing a solo, I wouldn't be using a digital piano soundfont for that. I would want to hear the full resonance of a genuine grand piano and I would spend the limited Mb allowance on that, being the only soundfont I would need to add to the score. Concert hall solo piano music differs from rock 'n roll band music in so many different piano ways that we're comparing apples with a fruit basket now. But even in the pianos, you didn't do the math to make the Bright Piano and Honky Tonk piano out of the same C-5 .wav samples. Change the filter cutoff point in the instrument to trim out the bass tones and you'll make a C-5 Bright Piano for no added .wav sample cost. Double up on the instrument to make two tones for two piano strings on the same note (as a real piano is made), one string in tune and one string slightly out of tune to make the C-5 Honky Tonk piano for no added .wav sample cost. Or is that added versatility just a couple of "ugly baby lizards" to you, lol.
So in the renovated house analogy, my renovated house has 3 rooms (3 different midi instruments out of 1 set of .wav samples), and your renovated house has 1 room. I could use the original, unaltered YDP .wav samples if I want longer samples (up to 16s in length) to make a heavier Mb package to equal the C-5, and the instrument and preset designs of my YDP soundfont would be the same: Stereo, Mono, Bright and Honky Tonk. But I don't think the overall quality of the soundfont would be any better by adding more Mb weight in the .wav sample length. How often do you hear a piano note that been sustained for 16 seconds that you would notice the difference? That's four sustained measures on a tempo of 60, and eight sustained measures on a tempo of 120. I don't have any sheet music that sustains a piano note for that long that I made the .wav cutoff decisions that I did. Is there a particular need for a 16 foot ceiling when an 8 foot ceiling is the standard? ;)
I also play the piano now, and I like to hold (or sustain) a chord in the beginning of the intros and/or the endings. I also decorate it with a few small touches of high notes. These are not as rare times as you might think.
Sure, but for no panning, use the YDP Mono preset and cut the .wav file Mb bulk in half. Then you can place the piano on the stage in an orchestral setting to move the sound wherever you want to in the orchestra panning.
Having two .wav files for the stereo forces your headset to use stereo at a predetermined and unalterable sound, versus math in the panning which can be changed at will to simulate a different piano arrangement, or even make a second preset.
I like the stereo sound that I made the preset for it. But there was somebody on the forums who wanted a Mono version specifically for an orchestral arrangement that I made the Mono version, too. Otherwise, the piano would sound like it's hogging the entire stage, violins on the left, horns on the right, and the stereo piano spanning 24 feet, lol. The poster had made a good point.
I can vouch that Ziya's Light Salamander is very nice. Sorry to hear it doesn't run well on some old Pc's but almost all PC's can handle soundfonts of a few hundred megabytes without any problems these days.
I have versions of the Salamnder around the 230 mb size as well as a Ziya Mete Demiricans on my site (as well as a few other pianos).
I found a FREE gorgeous, rich grand piano soundfont at -grand-piano.html. At the site, download the 1.18 GB Salamander grand piano, and unzip and install it into your MuseScore soundfonts folder, then add it to your synthesizer using the Zeberus tab. See the user guide for instructions. The sound is rich and really worthy of a grand piano.
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