Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Modeling vs Sampling

Not sure why we discuss such controversial topics over and over.

Both things have their benefits, theres no better or worse.
And you don't have to forget, that it's really dependent on the velocity, how it will sound.
Digital Pianos with integrated sounds seem to aim for the sweet spot, masking the sensing inaccuracies.

Although it gets less obvious with models like a Yamaha N1X.

Yeah, Pianoteq is right in the middle of the uncanny valley. As is Roland.

You can de-metalicise it you know . . . .

Does a photo of a pizza taste as good as a pizza?

Ask not what your piano can do for you; ask what you can do with your piano - Herr Hammerflügel (after JFK)

I can do lots with my V-Piano........because it's modeled .

"All else is gaslight" - Herbert von Karajan

The people on this subforum are hardly representative of the rest of the world. It also depends a lot, if you have a direct comparison of the unedited “recording” or if we are talking about a produced part in a mix.

With all due respect, Flo, this ‘subforum’ is indeed representative of the rest of the world.

This is why Yamaha, Roland, Kawai, etc.. have spies infiltrating this forum on a daily basis!

We are talking about people who play the piano in the first place, on a digital in the second and then are tech savy enough to go into a forum on the Internet.

I guarantee you, 90% of people who own a digital piano won’t be able to answer you what a VST is.

Nevertheless this is a very interesting target group for manufacturers, that doesn’t mean its representing anything else then the target group.

In marketing terms, we are some kind of persona like “John Doe, tech savy, mostly male” or something like that.

Trust me, they are analyzing the other personas like “Jane Doe, cares mostly about how the piano looks like in her living room as well”

(Please excuse the gender stereotypes, but unfortunately the that’s how the marketing world works)

That wasn't the conclusion! That was just the end of section 3 describing the current state of pure "physics all the way down" theoretical piano modelling where you run a simulation for 24 hours and get a couple of seconds of inaccurate audio for your trouble.

Section 4 goes on to describe more practical modelling methods for real world synthesis.

W.R.T. dissipation for example: It might be difficult to make a finite element model of a soundboard that does accurate dissipation, but that doesn't matter because practical real world implementations don't model the soundboard like that anyway. Instead they use soundboard models which are computationally much simpler, but are more accurate because they are based on the measured responses of actual real soundboards.

I guarantee you, 95% of people save 15% or more by switching to Geico!

"Measured responses of actual real soundboards" is just a convoluted term for "sampling" BTW.

And that's the truth in it: All "physical modeling" approaches in real world use are based around samples of certain real world piano models. They approximate those samples, but don't get anywhere close.

Well, then it means even real kick-ass modeling is far from perfect for even offline rendering, hence current modeling approaches are not exactly what many people imagine is going on but rather a simplified approximation of a pre-recorded sound?

Input: fingers ... and it had better feel right.
Output: sound ... and it had better sound good.

In between input and output: who cares?

That's pretty much what is it: "You get an approximation of samples we took so you save the storage space for those samples."

But storage space hasn't been an issue for more than a decade now. There is no advantage to this approach.

Indeed, as can sometimes be observed in the forums of certain modelling softwares.

No, it's a computationally efficient model of a known response. It's a model. It responds. So you're listening to what a soundboard would do *now* given what the string models are all doing *now*, rather than listening to a sound collage cobbled together from a bunch of recordings of different strings sounding at different times like you get from a sampled piano.

You can't make blanket statement like that. The advantage if the play-ability of the modeled engine compared to the sampled one. Now granted the super-mega sample size pianos do sound great and I would use Garritan if I was recording solo piano. But for practice playing I 100% prefer to use Pianoteq modeled piano for it play-ability. Especially if I knew I was going to be playing on a acoustic piano the piece. IMHO, see it is my opinion not making a blanket statement as fact, both have a place in the vsti world. Choice is good.

Peace

Or you could record yourself using Pianoteq because of the better playability and then render it out in a different VST of your liking. I there are hardly any limits in the digital world I guess.

There is no advantage in "play-ability" anymore. You can apply the same algorithms to simplified approximations of samples as you can to actual samples.

These are not the competition, because PC software doesn't represent state of the art technology. It's behind both approximation modeling and sample-processing hardware.

An aside : Marketing wise, it is obviously in the interest of the makers of Yamaha (also owner of Bosendorfer) or Kawai to condone sampling of their own excellent acoustics. Roland has no such choice, and its ADN is in synths.

Long term, my bets are on modeling. It may be fashion, but also the best brains are always more attracted to creating than to copying, and I think the best mathematicians are now working for Roland and Pianoteq.

On the other hand, you can argue that even perfect modeling tools are designed to the purpose of duplicating nature. It always struck me as ironic that some of the best efforts of IT geniuses were directed, in the end, at exchanging baby pictures or facilitating teen-age mating rituals.

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Or you could record yourself using Pianoteq because of the better playability and then render it out in a different VST of your liking. I there are hardly any limits in the digital world I guess.[/quote]

Some have luck with that approach and some not. But you are right in the digital world there are quite a lot of different approaches to get the job done. I just don't like the fighting that you have to be in one camp or the other. I use what works for me at the time. After all the software is just a tool to help get the job done IMO.