dore_m Hey Dore, since you are an expert on sampling and piano sound, I wanted to ask you about your recommendations of fiddling with VST sound. Of course it will be dependent on the vst used.
But sometimes I'm thinking of boosting the highs, especially the area near nyquist, to give more sparkle to pianos that sound a "bit dead". The problem clearly is, that we will drag the recording noises and other noises out a lot by that, but that's sometimes a price that I'm willing to pay. I have both linear phase eq's and eq's that only have post ring, so that the Attack will be preserved very nicely. Maybe you have heard of Airwindows, it's a guy who has created hundreds of high-quality VST's for all kinds of purposes, and they are all for free. He has a Patreon, that I also support. He has a great mentality- give away plugins for free, easy to use, small, reliable, don't break down, and for free, in hopes that enough people support him. Anyways, his plugin "Air" gives some really nice sparkle to highs, we have 11k, 15, and 21k tabs that give a sort of resonanty boost. I've sometimes used that one and it sounded better to my ears, but it's easy to overdo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7x2myOKEmk
In his videos he's giving examples of how to use the plugins. Maybe there are some interesting choices for you too… He has some quite revolutionary stuff, especially in the Compressor, Dither and EQ regime (and analogification plugs).