As with all my product reviews, I always include the company’s promo blurb and then try to analyze it.
Invariably, these promos end up taking half an A4 and amount to not a great deal more than a short ad trying to convince you to buy the highlighted product.
It is with great joy that I include Modartt’s short and accurate promo:
Feature highlights
* Responds in real time to pianist's interpretation
* Sounds and behaves just like a real piano
* Extraordinary playability and expressiveness
* Advanced tuning, voicing and soundboard adjustment
* Extremely small (8 MB) and fast loading
It is quite refreshing to see such a promo as it makes my life so much easier to review.
So, without further ado, and with no trepidation, let us delve into that which is Pianoteq.
Modartt’s decision to enter the world of emulation came about not through a whimsical fantasy of trying to break the high ram hog of today’s multi-sampled sample libraries, but through previous generations of attempting to create precise and natural sounding copies of a given instrument.
In this case, we are at the, as Modartt claim, the fourth generation of design and that Pianoteq is the fourth generation, the previous three being an acoustic piano, an electro-acoustic and finally sampled instruments.
Pianoteq offers two on-board piano types: Grand C1 and Grand M1.
The two instruments are not emulations of any particular brand or model, but are based on a number of varying textures explored by the designer. However, the C1 was modelled upon the textures of a Fazioli F212.
My tests were conducted on my PC with 2.0 GHz and 2 gigs of ram and using Cubase Sx 3. Please note that, at present, Pianoteq is not supplied as a standalone vsti, however, I have been informed that a standalone version will be available at the end of March.
As opposed to most sampled piano libraries, I experienced no CPU hogging and this made me a joyous man. I cannot stress how important this is and only those that have huge 1.5 gig piano presets will appreciate how important this factor is.
You are probably wondering how an 8mb piano emulation vsti will sound and stack up (no pun) to a fully fledged gazillion layered multi-samples piano library.
Beautifully, but we will explore this a little later.
For now, I would like to touch briefly on the editing capabilities of Pianoteq.
Tuning
This section takes care of all tuning needs, be it orchestral pitch tunings or temperament (gain dynamics across the range).
Octave stretching is an interesting utility. Some piano tuners tune the higher octaves a little sharper and the lower octaves a little flatter. The thinking being that the piano will sound a little ‘sweeter’ and harmonically more in tune.
The octave stretching does exactly this. However, care must be used here as the more drastic the stretching the more ‘out of tune’ the instrument will be. This is not to say that you cannot experiment and stretch the preset to mad amounts. After all, who said a piano has to sound like a piano?
A little bit of lateral sound design came into play just then.
Unison Width
This affects the 3 strings that the hammer strikes when playing. If the strings are out of tune to each you attain the Honky Tonk piano sound. The range is 0-20 and you can ‘detune’ the strings according to amount. Again, this can be used musically to create another palette of piano textures, or manically to create wild like effects.
Direct Sound Duration
This is more a compensatory function to be used in conjunction with the frequencies affected by the Unison and Hammer.
Voicing
This is clearly labelled and self explanatory.
You have detailed control over the hammer, both action and sensitivity.
You even have graphical control over the dynamics of the hammer action. This is incredibly useful as you can create ‘clunky’ piano attacks or soft attacks followed by crisp peaks. It is here that you can create any type of piano, ranging from heavy attacked Rock pianos to soft ‘tinkly’ ballad pianos.
It also serves to compensate for the playing dynamics as one controller (used to trigger Pianoteq) may differ in it’s velocity templates to another. I will leave you to explore all the permutations available in the voicing section. I spent hours creating and storing preset after preset, just by using this section.
Design
This section isvery interesting as it affords functions that influence the sound very subtly.
Piano size is a little as it implies ‘big/small’. It isn’t about making the piano larger but after the string length. The more ‘size’ you apply the longer the strings and this has a bearing, albeit subtle, on the harmonics created.
All the other functions in this section are pretty self explanatory with the exception of Quadratic. The manual states it a non linear response to the strings frequencies. Apart from the fact that I don’t really understand what this means, I cannot hear it too audibly as to what it actually does. I would like to believe that it is a ration control between harmonic and enharmonic control, but I can’t be sure.
However, a short email to Modartt revealed the secrets of the Quadratic:
”The quadratic effects can be heard when playing very loudly. It adds
double frequencies to strings which are being struck hard.”
BTW, Impedance is control over sustain as opposed to impedance in terms of voltage control. I thought I would point that out in case it got confusing.
Finally, we are left with Equalisation, Reverberation and Pedals control.
The EQ is represented graphically and is cleverly designed as multi-band. This affords great control across the whole frequency spectrum and can result in some very creative
dynamic sounds, making the sound design process so much easier.
The Reverb section is actually very natural sounding and well specified. I would go as faras to suggest that Modartt create a separate vst based on their reverb algorithms so others can use it to affect their own vstis.
The Pedals control is, as everyone knows, crucial in terms of expression and control and you are afforded decent control in this section too. By right clicking on a pedal, values can be input to control the pedal’s behaviour.
Finally, we are left with sample rate selection and polyphony.
On my PC I had no issues running 64 note polyphony and it barely spiked my meters.
In conclusion:
I must say that I really LOVE Pianoteq. Not only has it resolved most of my piano needs but the sheer quality of it’s emulation is quite amazing.
Coupled with an excellent and user friendly GUI, this product can only be a success.
Modartt currently offer additional add-ons for additional presets and I believe there will be further branded emulations made available at some point. That I am looking forward to.
Eddie Bazil
Pianoteq is available from www.modartt.com for both PC and Mac (OSX) and retails at 249EU.
Update
Pianoteq has now been updated to version 2.0.1
Revisions as follows:
Version 2.0.1 (2007/05/05)
Multicore rendering (for dual-core CPUs and hyperthreaded Pentium 4, can be enabled in the 'options' menu)
Receptor compatibility (distributed as a single dll in a zip file)
Fixed parameter automation
Stand-alone: added 'clear menu' entry in the various recent files menus
Stand-alone: output channel selection for ASIO sound cards
Stand-alone: metronome volume now adjustable
Stand-alone: fixed wav export bug
Version 2.0.0 (2007/04/04)
New soundboard model for all presets
New piano preset, C2
Stand-alone player
Microtuning with Scala support
Key release velocity
Stereo width slider
Lid position, open/half-open/closed
Smooth adjustment of parameters during play
Please visit here for a full revision list.