Why Are Sampled Pianos SO RUBBISH??? 

I understand that you’re trying to sell a product and therefore want to create the idea you’ve got something special to offer, which is fine. But the things you’re saying about other products on the market can at best be described as an ‘opinion’, but calling it misleading would probably be more accurate. We’ve progressed far beyond the Korg M1 piano sound you show a small clip of. There are quite a few options on the market that offer great dynamic range with many sample layers, offering a realistic sound with smooth transition from the softest to the loudest played parts. Also ‘less perfect’ pianos with ‘character’ can be found in many libraries. So your piano offering these features is fine, but not really unique. Ironically your demonstration of your piano sound in this video, although okay sounding, didn’t demonstrate that ‘great dynamic range’ you claim is missing in other libraries at all. 😅

While I support Christian and Crow Hill, wish them well, and is looking forward to their products, I still have to say I don't really agree with the premise. There ARE really great moldable and dynamic pianos out there already. Take a look at Garritan CFX, Native Instruments Noire, Fracture Sounds' various pianos, Spectrasonics' Keyscape, and also the most moldable one: Pianoteq. And there are more out there in fact. The problem, according to myself, is mostly the actual keyboard and its weighted keys. Nice idea for a video though and so far I enjoy the instruments you are coming up with. Cheers!

My classical piano setup is Pianoteq with a Yamaha CF50 as the keyboard. If your hardware keyboard doesn't feel like a piano, you can't play it like a piano, and the difference is audible. As for the vst, anything with samples feel like playing a tape recorder. Played one note at a time, sometimes sampled pianos sound better, but playing more than one note just doesn't feel like playing a single unified piano.

I just use Keyscape for pianos. It’s very realistic because it has adequate velocity layers and the Spectrasonics folks did an immaculate job matching all the samples and provide the user control over the sound.

Keyscape and Acoustic Samples C7 Grand are the most realistic piano libraries I've played. I have spent hundreds of hours on a real Yamaha C7 and when I play the sampled version, it literally tricks my brain into thinking I'm hearing (a great recording) of the real thing.

Funny, I was just thinking about this subject earlier today. Because when I've recorded live piano it always has this life that sample piano's just don't have. Which is kind of strange considering how one would think a piano should be a relatively straight forward instrument to sample. And I think it mainly comes down to a couple of thing: 1. Natural resonance in the instrument, especially when you play with big differences in dynamics(like quickly going from very soft to very loud, the instrument reacts differently than samples do). 2. How when you play the same note repeatedly(especially while holding the sustain pedal down), a real piano usually resonates/reacts/sounds different from a sampled piano. 3. How playing multiple notes together affects the overall sound(which simply doesn't happen with samples, where every note is sampled individually). 4. How sampled pianos are typically recorded and engineered in such a way that they sound much too sterile and clean(sure, there are exceptions, like the Vertical Piano), while recording live piano often gives me a lot more character. Perhaps 1-3 are all pretty much about the same thing, the natural resonance response in the instrument, that is not translated when playing static samples(even with all the velocity layers and round robins in the world), or maybe there is more to it than just resonance.

Why I use Pianoteq? Dynamics. I can set it how ever I want. I can always squash it later with compressor, but I want dynamics when I record. Sampled pianos always lack that. Pianoteq is an instrument. Sampled piano is a sampled instrument.

The shed's looking a little bare but you're looking happier and healthy in this video which is good. Keep at it!

I love the videos in the shed.The lighting is great.I still play your old videos,hahaha keep up the teaching.

The whole vibrating and resonating of all the parts of a vertical piano, let alone a grand piano, and the whole interference of all those vibrations can never be reproduced by whatever speaker system. Also the tuning can be very delicately different from pure equal tempered adding a lot of character and specific blending. And then the touch of the keys and the whole key mechanism. Forget it, you'll never get there...

I hope the mention of a realistic bassoon was a reference to Synthesizer Patel from Look Around You, even if subconsciously 😆

I think part of the issue is how MIDI velocity works. Its not measuring dynamics at all, its effectively measuring the speed between two switches. Plus, it doesn't matter how good or bad your technique is - someone else has gone through and played all the keys before you did. You're playing someone else's performance

The biggest problems for me with sampled pianos I face as a mastering engineer is that they cannot provide phase coherence at the bottom end. A sampled piano note played with another sampled piano note below Middle C is *NOT REMOTELY* the same as the sound of both notes being played together. With two sampled notes together, the phase intreractions cause comb filtering of the low end. I'm sure this is why piano sample libraries always have over-hyped stereo - they sound great in stereo. Try summing them to mono and hear all the low end of notes disappear with random gay abandon.

This is funny coming from the creator of the 400$ Hans Zimmer Piano library lol (just kidding, I really appreciate everything you do for composers, Christian).

Very interesting vid. Soooo good to see the Shed!! I would love to come work for/with you.

Your piano part reminded me of Ben Folds. Great sounding piano! I suspect one of the great difficulties in creating a real souilful, responsive sampled piano is that it's virtually impossible to capture how different notes (when played as a chord) interact rather uniquely with the space around them inside a room

The fundamental problem seems to me not to be the dynamics, but the fact that the strings of a piano interact with each other through resonances, a feature that most other instruments just lack. If you would want to capture that with samples you’d need different samples per combination of struck strings, which is of course not feasible do do in a generalized way since there are millions of possible combinations, especially if you also consider the cases where the player does not hit the keys as block chords but some frequencies are already decaying when new frequencies come in. That is why physical modeling has really got an edge over sampling if it involves pianos.

I can't believe I just found this channel. I am obsessed with your Fly on the Wall studio session video. Very talented and thank you for sharing your knowledge and life.

Hey Christian, great video as always! Quick question: could you do a video in which you explain why you're switching to cubase? I've heard you mention it several times now. I've been using Logic for a long time, and don't really have issues with it - I'm curious as to what the advantage to switching would be...

Around 1999 I started listening to this Icelandic group Múm. That was the first time I ever heard a woman sing like that. Every time I meet a client who’s fond of Billie Eilish I tell them about Múm. Nita has a lovely voice as well, and it so reminded me of that style. Anyway, thanks for the video and I'm interested to hear the final product and your feelings about the piano software.

I have spent ages crafting my own piano setup on my DAW so i can use it across a wide range of music styles. It consists of four midi tracks and two return channels. 1) Grand piano setting in Ableton live. 2) American Grand vst Arturia anolog lab V 3) German Gand vst Arturia anolog lab V 4) Savoy piano vst Arturia anolog lab 4 A return track with reverb and one with delay. Track one's piano i use the full range of the keys, track two is for the bottom half of the keys eq. For a boost on bass, track three for the top half eq. for highs and track 4 is eq. Egressively for that mid range punch. My reverb is eq. To roll off all the low end and the delay is just there in the background and peters of quickly.

Insightful video, thank you! Where's the new Vaults drop though👀

Hi Christian, I'm a (mostly elec.) guitar player and your videos fascinate me. I am the guy in the band who generally will say I hate the sound of sampled pianos but of course we all get why they are popular for the gigging musician. The same things are true for me with modeled amps verses tube amps. The experience of playing through a great tube amp will never be fully replicated by modeling amps. I think the same is true for piano sampling but I must say the samples you create sound great and fulfill the practical needs better than most of what I've heard and have their place in the creative world.

Is this a teaser? Did I miss it? When do we see it?

Hi there Christian (and fellow viewers)! If you could recommend a digital midi/piano/keyboard to a classical pianist looking to record digitally which one would it be ? So far I have my eyes on. Any tips from you or your viewers are most appreciated: - Doepfer LMK4+ - Roland FP-30X - Studiologic SL88 Grand Ps. The sounds themselves are not important only the keybed/action is as we will be using PianoTeq 8 to record.

Logic Stock Piano for me. Always got that up, just to tickle some ideas/sketches mostly. If using it for the 'final', I'd recommend more reverb/eq-ing, saturating on it.. But other than that, it just works. Yes, a 'workhorse'. ..I don't want it to do anything else. 😅🤣

Is it possible to save User presets on the Vertical Piano?

Why did you record that bass sine wave first? - As a reference point for your piano part?

I was wondering when the first mention of Marmite on this channel would occur! To overcome the "stiffness" of sampled pianos I usually layer at least 2/3 together, and very often I get some very interesting sounding "side effects"

Stina nordestam is a singing goddess! her work with David Sylvian is amazing, for new listeners, check out her track on the Romeo and Juliet Movie soundtrack and her video and track Dynamite,

That Bflat 3 bass octave is lovely and rich you can pick out the purity of those ringing bass strings I too love pianos aswell always has been old piano their tone aswell and each unison tuning between the trichord strings you every so slightly hear that wonderful marble sound in the tuning in the mid to high range especially when you use it dynamically you hear the action and feel the vibrations love the samples you’ve made ❤

Using a software piano in a live situation is completely different from using it in the studio. I have spent too many hours experimenting with layers, mono samples and carefully contoured velocity-switch points that sound great at home but as soon as they're run through even high-end P.A. systems sound flat, out of phase, brittle, or all of the above. Does anyone know if Pianoteq can cut it live? Does it have the range from quiet warmth to percussive attack needed to match the dynamic range of a good grand piano on stage? I'd love to hear about people's experience using it.

My late mother was born in the Philippines during the war and later became a piano teacher:-) Perhaps she heard a piano like this as a small child.... I find it very exciting that you sample instruments with history and thus make them accessible to others. The instruments that sound most real to me are sampled instruments whose acoustic, analogue counterpart I can't play or whose real sound I've never heard in a room. But with well-known instruments such as violins, pianos, guitars, flutes, etc., sampled instruments are simply imitations. They don't have the resonances, the dynamics or all the little quirks that acoustic instruments have. An exciting approach is certainly not to imitate the sound of the real instrument but that of a proper recording. And a beautifully sampled piano in a DAW is still much better than no piano at all🙂

Oo-er, contentious! Out of interest, when you use a studio piano, is it you playing or do you get a player in? Like any instrument, including electronic, a majority of the resulting racket is down to the player. Give a guitarist Eric Clapton’s guitar and it still sounds like the other player. This is a fun post and I’m looking forward to hearing the finished article. 🙏

Nice work. My favourite to play and compose on is a custom preset made on the Nord Grand, from one of their uprights and a layered sample. While on paper a software instrument sound be better, I haven't sound that realism elsewhere. I like a piano sound with character.

Great video as always… just a curiosity… I’m switching from logic to cubase too, will you make a video about that? It would be very interesting!!

I have to say I think this piano is expensive. That aside, I bought it and fu@@ing love it. Lovely character.

One of my favs is Skybox audios Obscura Grand. It's not perfect by any stretch but it has a vibe. All I really want is something like what you'd hear on an Olivia Dean album. The Vertical Piano is probably pretty close to that up-close indie singer-songwriter sound but I'm afraid I'll buy it and be disappointed - and at that price the disappointment will be amplified. I do still appreciate the work you're doing though👍

I have unfortunately never had the chance to play a midi masterkeyboard with a velocity curve that felt natural to me but some sampled pianos manage to compensate somehow, in that those occassional (no idea how to spell that) way too loud or soft notes sound like bold musical choices instead of just spastic playing

Such a beautiful sound mate

Well, you are concentrating on the dynamics (vertical) but not considering the harmonic interaction (horizontal) dimensions of the piano. Any piano is a complex harmonic whole of the notes played, sustained with the sympathetic resonances and harmonies of the other strings and frame of the piano. Sampling one note at a time and replaying it cannot capture those interactions, since they are constantly changing and evolving in myriad ways. So you have a set of static photographs of the instrument and not an organic whole which is a complex sum of a harmonic system. It is a living, breathing thing, which incidentally does not conform to the tempered musical compromise we are so used to. So i don't see how it is possible to recreate that. This is true of many instruments and ensembles. Sure we can imitate them with varying degrees of success, but they will never be the same thing. That is not a bad thing, it is a good argument for the richness of human beings playing physical instruments which never issue streams of identical notes, as samplers do.

IK Multimedia's new Pianoverse for me is an absolute game changer. 😎

I’d love to see a video as to why you moved to cubase from logic. Any possibility that is in the works?

Stina - she was one of the most interesting songwriters of the 90s - never toured as far as I'm aware. Seems to have retired 15-20 years ago, but left some great albums behind ('And She Closed her Eyes', and 'Dynamite', particularly.)

The limits of playing a sampled piano is, by in large, a midi limitation, how many discreet levels of volume are restricted by the midi format.

This is only my personal opinion so, anyone who loves sampled piano’s please ignore my following comment. I think certain “real” instruments are much more alive when you use acoustic modelling. I’ve used Pianoteq for years and it feel much more alive than any sampled piano I’ve ever heard. I’m not saying that there aren’t sampled piano’s that aren’t good or great but if you’re looking for a pristine piano(e.g. a Steinway), a product like Pianoteq is (in my mind) unbeatable. For those special “character” piano’s, sampling is great.

Nowt so good as a new thing eh Christian? I will be sure to resign all my previous purchases after your gentle diatribe! All the best!

I am Brazilian but I learned to like Marmite on my home made Sourdough😄 but just very little of it.

Why are you switching to Cubase? I used to use that back in the Atari days and then on the earlier Macs but then moved to Logic as soon as it came out. Don't think I could switch again now unless I absolutely had to so wondering what your reason for swapping is?

Christian, I think sampled pianos suffer from the same problems as sampled guitars. Those hammered and plucked strings produce complex harmonics. Trying to capture those tricky things is hard enough but when you throw in the fact that each action produces subtly different harmonics each time and you have a considerable challenge on your hands.

I still miss the character marked by the resonances within each piano. Hitting a note will always trigger other piano snares to resonate with it. This can be captured by sampling. However, hitting a chord will have those notes amplifying the resonances within the piano and cancelling others. And while you can sample one note, it would be extremely hard to say the least to capture every combination of notes within a piano and the different resonances that specific combination will produce within the piano, especially when those chords wiĺ be sustained within the next chord. Etc.

Thanks, Christian, but I think it's not there yet. It sounds very much like a sampled piano. Maybe the limitation is in the technology itself. Plugin-wise, Acustica has pointed in a different technological direction and it feels wayyy better to me than any other emulation, more 3D, very flattering to the sound source just as (or almost) the hardware counterparts do sound. I'm hopping MIDI 2.0 and more velocity layers will help... But then the amount of Gb per library will be ridiculous, so I think some kind of smart interpolation between sampled layers will be key. Will IK Multimedia come out with a MODO piano someday? That could be interesting too. New solutions for old problems... One day!

My go to favourite sampled piano is Native Instruments Alicia’s Keys. Sits well in a mix, lots of character - must have been using it for 10 years and find it very inspiring.

Great video/product!!

I often wondered why the Sample Library Builders never use a resonating layer that remembers previous keys touched, so they can make this subtle '3D' wash of resonating strings and wood. A note by note sample can't do that, while a real piano plays as a whole. Maybe it would work to capture how chords resonate and intermix as sums of sines. Can't explain it, but sampled pianos are 'empty'.

Thanks for keeping the rock rollin'!

You had some Stina Nordenstam in there! Caught you! Lovely mate.

There are a lot quality sampled pianos out there. We're in no shortage really.

Best teaser for any product I ever saw. BTW I love Marmite.

I was just thinking this very thing. I have so many piano VSTs and unless you can live play them in really well then they all sound dreadful.

with all due respect, my problem and growing concern with Christian's videos is that he brings a special level of intelligent charm and wit to the game that means he could convice us about ANYTHING and that's a bit scary to be honest. i would not like to buy into the reasoning that all my pianobook/spitfire/etc libraries are not good enough suddenly now and we have to buy this crow hill stuff. which is superb i'm sure of that. its just the over the top kind of reasoning that boggles me a bit.

Great performance.

We were made to calculate the amount of processing and memory needed to truly sample a piano, just to prove that computers quickly run out of resources once adding the cross-mod, and resonances happening between a few notes in a body.

Crows are some of my favorite birds. Love their yells. 😂

The subtleties of overtones with a piano can be like trying paint with water colours.

So no love here for Synthogy Ivory , I use that all the time for sessions and sounds great and has a large dynamic range.

I miss the annex !!

I'm generally against AI when it's doing the work for us, but it seems to me that machine learning trained on a bunch of excellent piano compositions, plus some onboard samples to seed the plugin would make for an excellent simulation. That said, that's a very nice piano plugin

Most of the NI pianos are lovely especially Noire and Una Corda / the pianos that Fracture Sounds have produced are simply brilliant and the best in class.

Vegemite lover here but you have to use it pianissimo ly.

I’ve been using Imperfect Samples, a UK source.

Pianoteq 8 is simply amazing. My goto piano for everything

Lip balm, Christian. Lip balm 🙂

What do you think about the possibilities of modelling instruments, Chris? The SWAM instruments are looking really interesting and Moore's law should make this an ever more convincing (sample beating?) approach in the very near future.

Piano In Blue (piano from Atlantic Studios) - still my personal, if idiosyncratic preference.

I actually love NI’s Una Corda

"There's also marjoram." LOOOOOOOL!

So will soon make rendering piano and other instruments sound however you like. This will happen relatively soon.

Nothing beats the real thing recorded well.

Pianobook provides enough interesting piano samples. That's why I don't look for commercial products anymore...

More Marmite please ❤

Beautiful voice, great piano and marmite is my mate cus I love the taste.

Korg M1 has the best Piano Sound - great performance, very realistic, only 5 Samples, very CPU friendly too.

Yeah, I find it hard to find a good piano sample.

I use Chroma (Sonuscore), EZKeys (Toontrack), Alt Piano (Westwood), Lo•Ki (Sonuscore). I love each of these for their own reasons. I did have to set them up quite a bit to perform how they need to, but they can do it.

I’m very happy with pisnoteq and Arturia. And all yours. And labs. And piano book. And… ok. Yeh. 😂😂😂😂

I find sampled pianos fine for songs with plenty of other elements but I think if recoding something sparse you really need to capture a performance on the real instrument

VSL Fazioli are absolute masterpieces.

Lovey song ❤

Pianoteq is astonishing

Marmite? I LOVE it! Sampled Piano? I wouldn't say hate, but I've never had a sampled piano library that I've liked.

Mission,,,,Accomplished!!!

Are you not with Spitfire anymore?

Many piano libraries sound too...well, "good"!

Ik has the best piano samples by far, but the software is trash

The ladies voice reminds me of a will-o’-the-wisp, something that moves between things, but is only ever seen in the peripheral. perhaps the piano could be more like another elemental, perhaps played a little more sparsely? just a thought< by the way, the piano does sound nice.

Fortunately MIDI 2.0 will help out the already released libraries a lot, not to speak about the coming modeling emulations by Pianoteq and others… Also, main problem are the piano players: to be pianist means to play as God commands. And that takes some training years. Finally, hardware matters: nothing still compares to a good Blüthner or Steinweg keybed, feeling the vibrations under the keys, pedals, etc. Not even talking here about the speakers that are far beyond the acoustics involved in this matter… nevertheless, let’s think that I’m about 10 years from now the digital to analog world will feel like those olden rachmaninoff times for us…

Really? Have you not tried Noire by Native Instruments? I absolutely adore that one. They did some seriously clever recording on that one. Pretty sure they made some rig to automatically play the keys at all different velocities. Totally know what you mean by the feel of the piano. Was telling someone on Facebook about Noire the other day and I said that it had the best feel of any piano I'd ever tried. Person thought I was nuts!! 😂

Arturia’s Piano v3 is very nice imo

Why are you switching to Cubase?