Buggy Whips [was]Re: [sdiy] Should I repair my Fostex, or should I go HD recording?

[Richard Wentk]

At 21:34 27/12/2004, Kenneth Elhardt wrote:
>Richard Wentk writes:
> >>I take it you're not overly familiar with the physics of pianos, pipe
>organs or orchestras. ;-)
>Simple experiment: 'play' middle C and the C above it so softly they don't
>sound. Give the C below middle C a staccato thwack.
>Can you hear anything?
>Try the same on a sampled piano. Tell me what you hear.<<
>
>I can't think of a circumtance where during a performance a person would do
>what you say above and this sounds a bit like nit-picking over unimportant
>details that will not be heard in a performance where you'll also have some
>kind of room reverb added.

*Anyone* with a half decent ear should be able to tell the difference 
between a sampled piano and the real thing without even thinking about it. 
It's screamingly obvious to my ears, and it has nothing to do with 
nit-picking. I've tried all the recent gigasampled pianos and they can all 
be described in one word: crap. They're fine buried in a mix with a ton of 
other stuff happening, but they sound like plastic plinky shite when played 
naked.

As for performance - you'll find variations on the technique I mentioned 
used in some contemporary classical pieces. It's a rare but not a 
particularly exotic technique.

In any case you're missing the point, which is that the resonance between 
specific string sets is what brings the sound alive. It's not a generic 
sustain on/off kind of a problem. It's inherent to the sound of the 
instrument. You can't try to solder it on as an afterthought and expect to 
get an accurate representation.

>In addition, the sampled pianos I own also
>include samples with the sustain pedal down so they will cause other
>vibrating sounds or strings.

But they don't work like a piano, because you'd have to create a different 
mix for every chord to include the overtones of each chord in addition to 
the notes themselves. And you still wouldn't get the movement in a real 
instrument.

>As somebody who has broken down a violin into individual harmonics and
>resynthesized it, there was no perceivable audible contribution of
>surrounding strings to the sound.

Clue: Try sitting close to a double bass section in an orchestra and tell 
me there's no acoustic coupling between instruments.

> >>No sampler models this acoustic coupling between resonant and reverberant
>elements,<<
>
>As per above, some piano samples do, and that's really the only instrument
>that is kind of like a big reverb chamber to any degree.

Actually - no.

Richard