Modartt Pianoteq - Physically Modelled Virtual Piano


Getting Physical

Physical Modelling - what's that all about?

Well, it's a software synthesis technique that - potentially - has lots of advantages over traditionally sampled real-life instruments. Instead of recording the real instrument, you study the real thing, and reduce its sonic behaviour and its response to external stimuli (that is, the musicians "input") to a series of mathematical formulae.

So far, very simple... Getting the model right is, of course, the tricky bit. But if you pull it off, you get something that outshines the competition in a number of areas:

  • While modern sample libraries tend to eat your hard drive for lunch and ask for more two hours later, physically modelled instruments take virtually no storage space.
  • Their response to player input can be extremely fluid and dynamic, without having to switch between innumerbale samples of the same note from the real instrument.
  • It's makes it easier to simulate the entire expressive range of an instrument with regards to various player control inputs - taking the piano as an example, you build the behavioural response to half-pedalling into the model, rather than having to record additional sets of piano samples with the pedal half-way down (or, preferably, several sets with varying degrees of pedalling).

The Main Piano Sounds

First off, all those looking for the Pianoteq to jump out of the box emulating their favorite piano will be disappointed. The company clearly states that instead of trying to nail a particular make of piano, they tried to integrate a bit of the best of everything into the sound. I would say they more or less succeeded (and it probably was a smart move, too, considering the amount of flak anyone claiming to perfectly replicate a Steinway Model B in code would take!) As of version 2, there are two "modern classical" piano models -- C1 and C2 -- with C2 being the one in active development. Each 2.x version has brought something new to Pianoteq's sonic arsenal, primarily on display through the C2 presets.

You can alter almost each and every aspect of the sound to your liking. You can change everything from the tuning to the size of the piano to the stiffness of its hammers and soundboard. In one small 10MB application, you have access to an almost infinite variety of piano-like instruments. Try that with modern day samplesets, and you wouldn't be close even after packing a couple of harddrives full of samples.

As with all physical modelling, giving the user control over every little parameter would be both overwhelming and probably not musically useful: In addition to the parameters available for tweaking through the user interface, there are also underlying, hidden parameters that define the basic characteristics of the piano (whatever they are) that can't be tweaked by the user. These are defined in "models" -- some of which are built into the main program, and some which are freely downloadable as add-ons from the Modartt website. So when designing your own presets, you should take some time to choose the most suitable model to base your new sound on.

The Add-Ons

Customers who bought the first version of this product have certainly had more than their fair share of free updates - in addition to steadily improving "mainstream" piano sounds, a number of small add-ons have been made available to cover a number of areas. While the first ones were just recreations of quirky, centuries-old pianofortes of little practical use to anyone but music historians, the latter ones are really useful instruments by anyone's standards. Pianoteq users now have a Blanchet cembalo model, a Yamaha CP-80 electro-.acoustic baby grand, and two colourful half-grands (Bechstein and Erard) at their disposal. None of which takes up more than a few megabytes of hard drive space!

Sound Design

There is a vast difference between the sound of version 2 and the original. Whereas version 1 only sounded acoustically credible if you got your head around thinking of your monitor speakers and surroundings as part of the piano casing(!), version 2 sports an all-new soundboard model that brings the wooden box into the sound. This gives the sound a true "recorded in a room" air, making it more familiar to those used to ambience-recorded sample sets.

Playability and "Special Effects"

This is where all the competition can pretty much pack up and go home. The last crop of sample players, like Kontakt 2/3 with its scripting and convolution abilities, are only just beginning to nibble at the edges of the features already tightly integrated in the Pianoteq: The way each repeated note changes in timbre depending on its state when it is re-struck, the way you can pedal-catch notes, and half-pedal etc. (given a progressive sustain pedal and -capable controller). Not to mention that there is no such thing as velocity-dependent samples involved - everything is smoothly gradual, all the way from note velocity 1 to 127! Still no sign of slackening lead here: While you still struggle to find even a half-decent progressive sustain implementation in the competition, these guys are tweaking away at things like half-pedalling sympathetic resonance. Kudos.

The actual mechanical noises representing the piano action may not be to everyones liking, however - but all can be switched off or at least very much attenuated.

Stand-Alone Application

While version 1 was only available as a plug-in, version 2 can run as a stand-alone application, which is very convenient for this type of solo instrument. An extra bonus is the 1-track MIDI recording/playback sequencer. (When you get tired of doing all the work yourself, just load one of the thousands of piano-roll MIDI files available on the net, sit back and enjoy!)

Conclusion

To sum up, let's put it this way: I may well use sampled piano sounds in final studio productions in the future (although the need is radically less than it was with version 1). After all, there are as many variations to the piano sound as there have been real-life piano models, and then some - each one, I'm sure, someone's favourite! However, I can hardly see me going back to samples when practising piano playing, or even when first recording a piano part.

And that's the judgement from someone who is perhaps an experienced, but not even a very good piano player. Only good enough to feel the difference between a living, breathing instrument and something just trying to be.