Modartt Pianoteq 3.5

The current crop of sampled pianos can give great results — but at a cost. First, streaming those tens of gigs of samples is a fairly tall order for a high-end Mac or PC, even with stacks of RAM, dedicated hard drives and high-bandwidth architecture. On a laptop, though, while playing back multitrack audio and other samples? Best of luck! Then there’s the question of flexibility. Even the most lavish sample libraries only offer a handful of pianos, and if the sound you’re after isn’t one of them, you’re pretty much stuck. Any real ‘sound design’ is off-limits — almost none allow it, and aside from offering a few tone tweaks, they’re essentially replay engines only.

In the past few years, though, an alternative to sampling has emerged, in the form of modelling — think Logic’s Sculpture plug-in, or Applied Acoustics’ GS1 guitar instruments. Acoustic modellers like these generate sound on the fly according to mathematical representations of actual physical systems, such as columns of air in a tube, or strings stretched over a bridge and soundboard. Not being based on samples, modelling instruments generally have a much smaller installation footprint, and can offer a remarkable level of freedom in tweaking the mechanical/acoustic systems they represent — even to the point of emulating instruments that don’t or couldn’t exist.

Does a modelled piano sound and feel as good as a sampled one, though? That’s the million dollar question, and one I’ll be considering carefully later on in this review.

First off, Pianoteq runs as a stand-alone application or a plug-in, in VST, Audio Units or RTAS formats. OS requirements are Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS 10.4 or later (Intel or PPC), or Linux (x86) with Jack and ALSA back ends. Only 256MB RAM is required, and a mere 20MB of hard disk space — I’ve saved Word documents bigger than that — but you’ll need a dual- or multi-core processor for best performance: this modelling is a CPU-intensive business. Having said that, various settings let you restrict sample rate or polyphony, allowing Pianoteq to work perfectly well on more modest machines. Installation is quick and straightforward, and authorisation/activation is handled automatically on-line (though a manual activation system is available too). A single licence allows for installation on up to three computers.

Next, and as of the most recent round of updates, there are actually two different Pianoteqs available. Pianoteq 3.5 Pro goes for 399 Euros and offers ‘per note’ tweaking of many parameters, for the ultimate in virtual piano design. It also supports high sample rates, up to 192kHz. However, Pianoteq 3.5 Standard, at 249 Euros, is more like the previous versions of the program, and it’s this I’ll get stuck into first, to see what’s the same, what’s new and what’s different.

The rest of the interface — which, on the whole, is simple and intuitive in use — is split into sections. In the top half are Tuning, Voicing and Design sections, whose tasteful ‘piano internals’ photographs slide back to reveal a fair number of parameters. Below are some more general parameters: a graph display where you can tweak velocity response and EQ, an Output section that includes master volume and virtual miking options, and a series of ‘Effects’ toggles, which allow action noise, tremolo, reverb and an output limiter to be turned on and off and small configuration panels for each to be displayed. For quite a compact window, there’s a lot going on, and it’d be impossible to go into detail about every parameter without this review turning into War & Peace, so here are some of the highlights.

The tuning section offers the normal ‘master tune’ function, setting concert ‘A’ to an accuracy of 1/100th of one Hertz. A handful of built-in historical temperaments is supplemented by support for the Scala tuning format. Other historical, ethnic and experimental tuning systems can be loaded via a Scala .kbm file, and there are thousands available for free on the Internet. Varying the Unison Width (the small variations in pitch a piano tuner introduces across the two or three strings that make up one note) introduces movement and richness into the sound, and at an extreme it creates a honky-tonk or ‘pub piano’ effect.

In the voicing section, hammer hardness makes a tremendous difference, conjuring up anything from an almost muted ‘practice piano’ effect to a sparkling, metallic tone that sounds like you’ve pushed drawing pins into the hammers. Because it’s independently adjustable for varying dynamic levels, and Pianoteq smoothly fades between them, subtle and sometimes remarkable effects can be produced with this parameter alone. The Strike Point fader changes the harmonic content of the sound, as if the string had been struck nearer to or further away from the bridge.

Some of the design section options are really interesting, too. Impedance, Cutoff and Q factor all adjust the response of the virtual soundboard, varying it from (apparently) a thick, inert plank to something weirdly resonant and energetic; somewhere in between those extremes is what most pianos are really like.

Microphone pickup modelling was introduced early in 2009 in Pianoteq version 3, and it’s quite flexible. Up to five virtual mics can feed any combination of five output channels, with individual level and delay settings. They’re placed with reference to a plan and side view of a piano (whose lid you can open and close), and their position is adjustable in three dimensions. You’re not bound to use this modelling, but it does add a sense of realism. The virtual acoustic, though, is not configurable, nor is the type or model of mic.

Rounding off this little tour, there are plenty of options for action noise: key releases, dampers (that nice ‘swoosh’ you get on some close-miked recordings of real pianos) and sustain pedal. The reverb is a useful addition, but its type isn’t specified. It appears to have just one quite flexible algorithm, thankfully quite well suited to piano and not too ringing or rough.

Taking Pianoteq on its own terms, there’s no doubt that version 3.5, in both Standard and Pro editions, is the best yet. All the ‘wow’ stuff is still there — carefully press down a silent C-major chord in the treble (to raise the virtual dampers), whack a short C-octave in the bass, and that higher chord starts ringing in response, just like on a real piano. Interactions like that are taking place constantly, helping to create a coherent musical result, and often creating an uncannily authentic and rewarding playing experience. For me, no other virtual piano matches the naturalness of Pianoteq’s dynamic response, and it’s one of the very, very few virtual instruments that you can feel truly involved with, and ‘coax’, in the same way as a real instrument. The v3.5 model is more subtle than ever, too, and includes (among other things) sympathetic resonance of the strings on the ‘dead’ side of the nut and soundboard bridge (the so-called duplex scale), and even more realistic partial damping of strings when very quick or shallow pedalling is used. The breadth of application of the pianos supplied as standard is impressive, and together with the miking, voicing and design options, they cover masses of stylistic ground, from the distant past to cutting-edge experimentalism. The Pro version’s Note Edit options won’t be for everyone, but they could prove revelatory to established and new Pianoteq addicts.

There’s always a ‘but’, though. Much as I enjoy playing Pianoteq, my personal feeling is that its main pianos don’t quite match the level of realism in the raw sound of the multi-gigabyte libraries. It’s jolly close, but I’m sometimes aware of a certain ‘artificial’ edge, very difficult to describe. It’s not anything that could be fixed with EQ or dynamic treatments, but more like a slight lack of weight, a stiffness, a sort of absence of beauty. We’re getting into poetic realms, but maybe that’s inevitable when you get to this level of emulation accuracy. I don’t want to overstate this, though — it’s a marginal and very subjective thing, and I’d advise prospective purchasers to try out the demo version to see what they make of it.

In terms of CPU usage, it proved more than acceptable on my Apple MacBook. Running stand-alone or as a plug-in in Digital Performer 7 and Logic 9, at 128- or 256-sample buffer settings, even full piano parts with lots of polyphony and plentiful use of the sustain pedal rarely used more than about 25 percent of the processor, and most often about 15 percent. It’s not a processor hog, by any stretch of the imagination.