My Desert Island Piano VST - VI Labs Modern D

CraigNZ t's a sign of how good the Modern D is that it makes even a VI as good as the Bechstein seem a bit ordinary.

i personally think that they're not comparable at all (eventhough i'm a fan of the digital grand myself)
yea they're in the same price range but the modern d has so many more "necessary" features, all the resonances, all the pedals, all the noises, best release samples on the market
and yes the modern d is very good, undeniably underpriced for what it is (it can do what some 600$ pianos can't)

I downloaded that piano yesterday and Im not so impressive. For recording it is ok, sounds nice but not for live performance. I prefer playability of pianoteq. I can sell the license for 140 Euro.

Ambrozy17 before you give it up, try and experiment with creating a velocity curve. That’s the most important step to get any library, sampled or otherwise, to the playability you like.

Ambrozy17 I downloaded that piano yesterday and Im not so impressive. For recording it is ok, sounds nice but not for live performance. I prefer playability of pianoteq. I can sell the license for 140 Euro.

🤔

Pete14 here we are again, being suggestive with an emoji. I can hear what you’re thinking, yes, let him be converted. And no, I’m not going to let him just throw away beautifully sampled and scripted piano like that.

David B Timbre shift doesn't drop any notes in the VI Labs Modern U/D like it does in VSL Synchron products.

However it can drop the release samples of the last treble notes equipped with damper : this occurs because the notes after (without damper) are shifted down (if timbre setting is negative). So these samples don’t have any release samples and are cut abruptly as the ADSR envelop is remained unchanged (ie. release time = 0).

This is confirmed with Ravenscroft iOS (and by UVI support) but I don’t know for desktop versions.

Maybe you should not even try to check this to avoid any disappointment 😅

David B Can you try this preset on your Numa and tell me what you think? Thanks.

I like it! Very crisp and clean, close overall perspective but still with a good sense of air around the notes.

Maybe just a touch bright for me in the treble, which I why I usually set the tone knob to -1.0, but this is just a personal preference.

I'm going to keep this one saved as one of my presets - thanks.

Argyris A lovely performance of my favorites from WTC Bk I. I really enjoy the accompanying fugue as well. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! Hard to go wrong with the WTC, and this is also one of my favorites.

jdg78 You know, maybe I'll give it a try, too. 🙂

David B I'll give it another try this weekend when I have time, David. Thanks.

FWIW, here are a couple of pics of my pedal on that graph in Ivory.

Ambrozy17 I prefer playability of pianoteq

who don't? the only thing that makes pianoteq a buy is its playability.
but me personally... i don't wanna sacrifice the sound and realism to get an extra 10 percent playability.

pianow i don't wanna sacrifice the sound and realism to get an extra 10 percent playability.

So you’ve actually gone and quantified Pianoteq’s playability?

How did you arrive at “an extra 10 percent playability;” what kind of metrics are we talkin’ here?

Pete14 Relativism, Pete. Modeled pianos are less resource intensive, the typical sizes are smaller, as you know very well (since you use modeled piano VSTs only). So he wasn't saying exactly more than 10% of playability.

That said, I agree with pianow. I wouldn't sacrifice realism of sound for that extra playability and resource saving.

For me if a sampled vi has meh tone, then it loses totally. If a sampled vi has sweet tone but unbalanced in some aspects or with extremelly huge disk footprint, it won't be opened a lot and gradually phazes out.

For a modelled vi with meh tone, I could pretend it is still learning and could be better later, and I will take advantage of its playability instead of blaming the tone.

pipAT For a modelled vi with meh tone, I could pretend it is still learning and could be better later, and I will take advantage of its playability instead of blaming the tone.

What a gracious / big heart you have! I wouldn't go for the meh tone, LOL.

There are more sampled vi products than modelled ones. Sampled products offer wide choices of tone. That's what I like. Modelled products are based on limited training materials. Often general and pure tone that sometimes sounds wierd in real life. I guess it is still too early to say modelled products cannot do better. 18 years ago, PTQ sounded like toy or GM midi. But it is getting better in painstaking speed. I just like to see more choices and oppotunities to play the piano.

David Lai So he wasn't saying exactly more than 10% of playability.

But that’s the problem, he did actually say ‘10% more playability,’ and this can be misleading for anyone in the market for a VST; which is why he should simply say that his impression is that Pianoteq is more playable ‘in general,’ but the minute he gives a figure, “10%,” I have to step in for the sake of transparency!

Imagine if all of a sudden you find out that “2% reduced fat milk” is just some guy’s random assumption, but no measurements were properly & scientifically taken and verified by a third party; that could mean that you’ve been drinking milk that is 1% or 1/2% reduced all along, yet you thought it was 2%, so no, this is not acceptable!

He needs to clarify, redact, and/or show me the data confirming ‘10% more playability.’

I don’t make the rules; I simply enforce them!

Before I bought an FP30X, I was worried that I might be disappointed by the tone. It turned out I didn't care much when I was practicing. I guess I am more picky about the tone of sampled products because the tone is what I am eagerly expected to enjoy. I know what modelled products sound like. So, I can lower my expectation for that. For sampled products, as long as its playability is on par with hardware or digital pianos. I can lower my expectation for the playability for production purpose not for piano performance.

Now I see these different tastes:

Acoustic preferred.

Sampled preferred.

Modelled preferred.

Hardware preferred

Hybrid or Smapled preferred.

Pete14 I don’t make the rules; I simply enforce them!

What an imagineer. Don't you even know how literature works? Something that average people can understand what he's doing, and you come and question him? I'm shocked.

Pete14 what kind of metrics are we talkin’ here?

it's called "experience"
i played several sampled pianos, some modeled ones and of course some acoustic ones

and based on my experience the gap between most top notch sampled pianos and the pianoteq (in terms of playability) isn't that big (vsl, garittan, vilabs and some others)
maybe it's even less then 10 percent but it's noticeable and that's why i talked about it in the first place.