Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Roland HP-307 using sampling or modelling?

Given that Roland already refers to the sound on their RD700GX as
Supernatural piano sound, is there any reason to believe that the new HP-307 is using anything more than their standard sampling approach?

Does anyone have the actual facts for what this instrument offers?

The sound in the HP307 consists of a combination of both sampling and modelling, called "SuperNatural". In the RD700GX SuperNatural technology has also been used as you said, but only for the electric pianos

/Andrée

RD700GX is fully based on sampling. HP30xs are based on both sampling and modeling. And V-piano is fully based on physical modeling.

Both HP20xs and HP30xs use some velocity-layers of sampled sounds, however there is difference in the usage of these layers. Previous models use these layers by switching(which layer is used is determined by the velocity). New models merge these layers by physical modeling technology, for smooth tone change along velocity or for smooth tone change in the decay of sound.

If you read Japanese, please visit

http://www.roland.co.jp/PIANO/oto/index.html

Even if you don't read Japanese, you can see some figures or videos for explanation from this page. Click the piano, click next and click the left button(left button is for the new tone generator, right button is for the previous one).

According to the page for RD700GX, SuperNATURAL Technology is used only for the sounds of electric pianos in RD700GX.

So, it sounds like it is not new but just extending what has already been done to electric pianos to the other piano sounds...

SuperNATURAL E-piano and SuperNATURAL Piano might be different technologies.
Please let me translate a paragraph from http://www.roland.co.jp/products/SuperNATURAL/

---
For various genres of products, give most relevant "SuperNATURAL" respectively!

"SuperNATURAL" is not one effect or one mechanism. Strings, keyboards, wind instruments, percussion, folk instruments and electric instruments have their own structure for sound and have their own sound-making or techniques. Then "SuperNATURL" creates these various parts. Respectively for various genres of Roland's electric instruments, the new world will be born by "SuperNATURAL".
---
I tried to translate as directly as possible.
According to this paragraph, I read "SuperNATURL" is not a name for one technology but a name for the set of technologies(SuperNATURAL Piano, SuperNATURAL E-piano, SuperNATURAL Guitar, SuperNATURAL Sax,,,). Each time they add an instrument(or a group of similar instruments), they have to build a new physical model.

Thanks for that. It sounds like they need to hire some branding consultants.

So has anyone played an HP-307, HP-207, RD-700GX, V-Piano and PianoTeq side by side to compare expressiveness, playability and sound?

Can you point us to a Roland site that says what you are saying here?

"RD700GX is fully based on sampling. HP30xs are based on both sampling and modeling. And V-piano is fully based on physical modeling."

For RD700GX
I should have had to write "For acoustic piano sounds, RD700GX is fully based on sampling." From
http://www.roland.com/manuals/en/index.cfm?iRcId=1810807&dsp=1
you can see "RD700GX Owner's manual".
pp.202 item "Tones" shows there are no SuperNATURAL tones besides E-piano tones.
So it is natural to think that RD700GX's acoustic piano tones take conventional technology.

For HP30xs
http://www.roland.co.jp/news/0447.html
In this page they say ""SuperNATURAL Piano tone" merges the technology of Roland's highest-end "V-piano" and the technology of "88keys stereo-multi-sampling", which is achieving popularity."

For V-piano
http://www.roland.co.jp/news/0407.html
In this page they say "New "V-piano" takes totally new technology which simulates the process in a grand piano. The hummer hits the chord, then the sound propagates to the pegs, the frame, and the soundboard. So It builds up a virtual piano in it."
This is exactly Physical modeling.

Oh but they have! Mission Accomplished!

I think it's generally safe to assume it's plain vanilla sampling unless they make a huge, huge deal about it. Even then, it could be just sampling with a bit of old technology layer blending or sympathetic resonance "modeling" (i.e. reverb) thrown in.

This shtick got old a long time ago...

A bit off-topic here but KAWAI is also not giving much detail regarding the "Ultra Progressive Harmonic Imaging" technology on its new CA93 and CA63 pianos

Especially confusing is the fact that Roland is now selling a hardware/software expansion kit for the RD700GX to give it the Super Natural sound that it supposedly already has!

I'm starting to love this stuff. An entire industry based on ancient technology re-spin and extreme marketing confusion.

It is becoming very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff of all these exuberant announcements.

At the end of the day the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the proof of the instruments' value is in the playing. It will be interesting to attempt to get some fair side by side line ups to actually try them out and see if we are being asked to pay for something more than marketing fluff.

I can say, however, that if I start to feel real differences (such as I felt when playing the VPiano for the first time), then I will be very likely to pull the trigger on one of these current product generations in 2010.

Yes. Roland even says this on one of their web pages. The technology was first applied to drums then things like Saxophones and violins, e-painos and now finally acoustic piano.

A lot of the confusion between "samples" and "models" is that people want to see this in black and white. But really there is a continuum.

Let's say you wanted to "model a car". You could set it speed by the current setting of the gas pedel angle and the grade of the road. You measure a real car and make a table and the simulation would be reasonably real. This is called a performance model. But you could also make a more physically based model where we look at the amount of gas in the cylynder and how much heat burning that gas makes and the pressur on the piston, friction looses inte drive train and so on this would be called a physical model

I think these "models" used by "SuperNatural" and the new Yamaha CP1/5/50 are more like the simple performance model. V-Piano and Pianotec are more physical. But the line is not sharp.

Yeah, having fooled around with some physical piano models lately, I think it's highly unlikely that V-Piano is actually a 100% physical model. I don't believe that's even close to being feasible right now, maybe theoretically but it won't run real-time on consumer-grade hardware. There's got to be some measurements (aka sampling) of some parts, and also they will certainly have had to leave out a lot of less important details in the actual physical models.

Of course, in five years, we'll understand the physics better, the hardware will be ten times faster, and hence the limit for what you can model will have moved.

ChrisA and Ole, valuable food for thought on the matter of modeling. Thanks for these posts.