Perfect Piano Download
Christain Cobb
Piano Perfect, LLC is an authorized Steinway piano dealer selling new and used pianos, as well as offering tuning and repairs. Come to Piano Perfect for a completely customized piano buying experience.
Invisible Forces is the sophomore album from Heather, whose debut Stories From Far Away on Piano garnered critical success from fans and tastemakers alike. I plan to ask him about second album nerves, but the stories that he has to share distract me from conventional lines of conversation.
The piano he found was at the workshop of Piano Restorations in Twyford. The instrument had been restored inside to the original specifications and he brought it back to his home, just as the pandemic was dawning.
Empathy underpins the album. The leading single Hidden Angel is a letter of forgiveness to the driver. Its light ostinato melody meets with chords on the far left keys evoking a sense of duality; tension and relief. Heather has been unable to track the driver down, to tell him that despite the odds, he lived. His music has been an outlet.
Piano has been the instrument of choice for Heather since he was a child growing up in Southampton, with access to be inspired by musical figures. His father, a former Navy man, was also musically inclined; he used to help run a club called The Brook, enabling this young and curious boy to meet musicians who were passing through, including Captain Sensible from the Damned and Hugh Cornwall from The Stranglers.
The striking album artwork, by long-time collaborator Suki, is a representation of the many invisible layers of our inner and outer worlds. Three stacked cups appear to reveal an orb, against a twilight shade of mauve.
My situation with his Vol. 3 was this: I bought it several years ago and was never 100 percent happy with it. I used it on jobs for several years but still was never happy with it. I often used the Kurzweil MicroPiano in its place. I chalked up my unhappiness to the interaction between the sampler (an Akai S500), the midi controller (a Roland A80) and his sample. I was not pissed at him, it was just an unfortunate purchase on my part.
As far as I know there is no refund policy with his samples. I learned a lesson, I will never base an expensive purchase on a MP3 file at a web site. I am sure his samples are first rate and I am sure many professionals use them - I just was not one who was happy with my purchase, but I never took such a vocal stand until now. His words at this site and his modification and deletions of my posts at his site made this now a matter of personal integrity for me.
Wm. Coakley's deletion and modification of my posts at his web site and the ... well, lies, about Marino that he is spreading is not smart. Unfortunately for him, Google will keep all of this information around for some time.
Discontinue the profanity or your IP will be reported to your internet provider. Person using the handle "DAVE HORN" or DAVE HORNED" Be notified that your further presence here will be considered harrassment. Cease and desist and we will delete your posts. As long as you persist they will remain until your internet provider contacts you.
My last post at his web site had the subject as The Keyboard Magazine Forum and I mentioned the fact that google will provide more information about his product long after the modified or deleted posts. I believe that was the last post before he shut down. I called him again and left a message on his voice mail.
I'm not sure that I want to dedicate more minutes of my life to mr. Coakley than it's strictly necessary, but this thread triggered an interesting memory: Just before buying vol.III, I wrote an email to Dave Horne to ask for his opinion about it, as I had read somewhere that he was using it (the Akai version, IIRC). I don't think Dave was a regular contributor here yet.
Dave answered me quickly, and kindly offered to send me a few notes of the Coakley samples in raw Wav format, to help my purchasing decision. I asked for something in the bass register, so he sent me a couple of notes in that range. When I listened to them, I thought they were incredibly overbright, though clean; but I also thought that those being raw samples, with the right filtering and accurate enveloping they could come to life. Unfortuntely, I neglected to ask for something in middle or medium/low register...
To make it short, I ordered the vol.III, and when it showed, I was shocked to discover that it contained NO filtering, and very minimal enveloping. Every VAST algorhythm was set at "None". There were 3 versions of the samples, differently EQed, and I found all of them of a nasal/metallic quality and very limited dynamic range. When the notes entered the loop stage, the sound was buzzing and unpleasant, and the loops had infinite sustain. I had not seen that since the times of the Roland U-110!
That's why I started programming my own Kurzweil patches, in order to improve warmth and playability. I wouldn't admit that I had just made a wrong purchase... I spent a lot of time on that, creating different VAST layers, dividing them both by range and velocity, and trying various types of filtering and scaling. I think I improved the original samples quite a bit (for my needs at least). But I ended up using Mike Martin's KeySolutions Steinway for all my piano needs. I'm *still* using it, to be sure.
Give me two or three days to complete my current gigs, then I'll post a picture of my copy of the Coakley disk. Then I'll try to contact mr. Coakley personally. Depending on his response, and after talking with my lawyer, I'll decide what to do.
Thanks again everybody (Dave, Jeebus, Martin, Sam, and all the others) who have taken the time to post on Coakley's site in my defense. This was not only appreciated but useful. And thanks all the forumites who have spent words about this whole madness on both forums.
The only reason I can think of that someone would modify your post to say that you're "vinally" coming out - complete with mis-spellings - is to create the perception that you're making inappropriate posts, thereby justifying your being banned from that forum.
Anyway - there's something I forgot to mention in my previous post: One of the reasons I got misleaded in my purchase of the Coakley samples, was that there was very little piano solo among the demos on Coakley's site. The piano was almost always buried in strings or rhythm sections.
A few more thoughts ... I'm 55. If I were thirty years younger being labeled gay in a very public forum might have been devastating. When you're younger you are very often not secure enough in yourself to handle anything that comes your way.
The _only_ things in this entire spectacle where I was less than noble was leaving a voice mail message for Coakley (after he hung up on me) which was very rich in color. Also, I no longer possess that CD ROM.
My involvement in this was initially to show my support for Marino. When I was verbally attacked at Coakley's forum ... and after he hung up the phone on me without listening to what I had to say, it became very personal. I even sent him an e-mail advising him (for his own business interests) to return here to apologize and straighten things out. He instead wanted to play hard ball ... and this is not the ninth inning.
Heres the piano in question using the stock first patch and recorded analog outputs to an old Mackie board. You are hearing the piano raw without any reverb, any effects, any EQ. Keep in mind, this is my K2000s which only has 12 stereo voices so not too many notes can sustain at a time. In fact, you can hear them dropping out as the stealing algorithm begins trying to grab them in one part of the piece. The piano sounds close because theres no ambience in the samples. The criticism was:
I found the midrange and bass registers very harsh and nasal, though clean, and with a very limited dynamic range. The VAST programming was non-existent, it always came up horrible-sounding to my ears, even with my VAST programming. I also played it for several musicians friends, and they *all* agreed with me - it was just ugly-sounding to my ears.
The claim of no or non-existent VAST programming can only be attributed to one thing... piracy. Every disk I sold was copied from a master, so it would be impossible for anyone to have an original Coakley Kurzweil disk that didnt have the VAST programming. I repeat impossible. Piracy and theft take a number of forms. Sometimes, as might be the case here, samples are hacked from one format say an Ensonic disk and the programming was left behind because it was of no use to the Kurzweil. So the pirated disk only has the samples on it but no programming.
As for the nasal, harsh, ugly sound nasal comes to mind. As I was setting up my old K2000s I was fumbling around with channels on my controller and I found this nasal sounding piano that was harsh and not a very pleasing sound. It was the stock Kurzweil piano! One more channel press and I was at my piano which you hear in the demo. It may be that this person was unaware that they were on the wrong channel which is easy for someone new to midi. And he would swear as he looked at the patch in the display that he was playing my piano but he wasnt. The efforts of this individual to program the VAST engine to make a warmer sound would also follow from having a pirated disk.
**JS:** It feels like your old label had a real expectation for you to be this shiny, happy piano pop star, whether you wanted to or not. How much pressure was there to create music on their terms, and how much input did you have?
The problems of piano sampling were brought home to me while porting pianos from a commercial sample library over to the Ensoniq EPS and EPS 16 Plus. The quality of the samples was just fine, but if you've ever tried to sample a piano, you know what the difficulties are:
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