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Hi everyone - hope you're enjoying my piano sample. I created and posted that a few months ago. I pretty much agree with alot of what was written on this thread. Kontakt is frustrating yes, which is why I added the SFZ version. Kontakt is alot easier to manipulate and more flexible for adding reverb and tweaking curves and such. You just have to know how to do it.

Any constructive criticism is welcome.

Jonky Ponky - if you've improved the sfz file, feel free to post it somewhere. Its not easy to add revisions on Pianobook (last I checked). I just ask that you describe to me how you improved it (in a little more detail) so I can learn and gain experience for my next go-around. I've got a few potential projects I'm considering.

If anyone does any recording with it, please send me a copy or post a link. The reward for me for putting this out there is to hear my piano played by the community.

I give up. Too much of a hassle. Can't seem to make it work and somehow I corrupted my Garritan files when I was messing round with the Sforzando player. I try to load Garritan CFX and it says I'm missing things. So now I'm downloading that from scratch again.

At least I got to play my piano for an hour today in spite of the wasted time trying to get these free samples to work. Also, my wife and I wrapped up Christmas presents for our boys. That was fun.

God Bless,
David

@Dore Thanks for your creation! I am very impressed with it. I attached a Youtube link in the first post where we can enjoy the beautiful sound of the instrument (and of Final Fantasy awesomeness too :))

@David B

I made a video explaining it. If things are too small come back to it later, when it is fully processed as FullHD. Feel free to ask if there are still questions.
https://youtu.be/3q0AAUkeM5Q

Thank you for the video. I'll try it one more time tomorrow following your instructions and report back.

God Bless,
David

Thanks everybody for their patience in explaining these things to David B. and I. And apologize for my rude comment early (I was obviously exasperated, but I guess most people would agree with my complain, even not with the form I expressed it).

Anyway, I followed the instructions from the video that Gamma1734 posted (thanks a lot for bringing this instrument to our attention and for further giving us these step-to-step instructions) and indeed they work!!!

I also followed these other ones for the ARIA player and they do work as well: https://usermanuals.garritan.com/ARIAPlayer/Content/sfz_libraries.htm (the only glitch is that you have to "set folder locations for external libraries" FIRST even though the instructions show them second, oh well)

I have not tried the Sforzando player yet and I wonder if it's worth the effort? Anybody uses that? How does it compare to ARIA?

Now another question: my understanding is that this instrument requires Kontact full (not the free Player) to work properly. Is that correct? If so, what would I miss regarding this instrument using the ARIA player or the Sforzando one compared to Kontact? Would it sound the same?

Last, but not least, many many thanks to Dore for sampling such a beautiful instrument (indeed my favorite acoustic grand) and make it available to us for free. I will play it a bit in the coming days and see if it's really the digital piano sound that I seek (disclaimer: I am very picky and I think every digital piano sound I tried is at most mediocre, and on average they are quite terrible )

Thanks again Dore. Both Mason & Hamlin and your VI are getting some well deserved attention around here.

What's the difference between Aria Player and Garritan's standalone application? Is the Aria Player capable of understanding every possible configuration parameter in the Garritan CFX files including the re-pedaling stuff, etc?

A bit off topic but I see in the CFX.sfz file the lines that deal with my re-pedaling fix are:


Seems like this is a generic SFZ tag (or whatever it is called and needs to be interpreted by com.Garritan.Piano.MIDI.Preprocessor which might no be present in the Aria player). All that's a speculation, I have no time to study anything these days...

I thought the free Sforzando was for free instruments and hobbyists. And the Aria was for Garritan instruments based on the following link (click on the "sample players" button).

http://ariaengine.com/products/

However, Del Vento's link above shows Aria plays with any third party .sfz file. . .

Sforzando according to my antivirus, was attempting to open some of my other files. But I didn't expect it to work well on a small netbook anyway.

So I hope people are successful at using my VI. I know it can be a chore to set these things up, but we piano enthusiasts obviously are willing to put energy into these things. Setting up a digital piano + computer + VST already isn't a simple thing for most people.

As I mentioned, seeing (in youtube vids) and hearing (soundcloud, etc) my piano played by others is actually really a thrill and makes the work worth the time and effort. It was priceless to me to see Christian Henson's reaction (co-founder of Spitfire Audio and Pianobook) to playing it for the first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B7...N80lMpPL1xCjBZpc70M&index=1&t=1s

Speed forward to around 1:04 near the end of the video.

What has struck me as interesting over the course of making the VI, getting feedback and reading this forum is that VI's are usually made for music producers and composers who want good sounding recordings. The people on pianoworld are mostly players who want a better EXPERIENCE. This is fundamentally different because both the controls and sampling environment are different for players (vs. producers).

I think this is the reason that my piano is getting praise from the community. Playing a piano VI that has been recorded at Abbey Road, even with a binaural recording does not give the same feel as playing a piano in your living room (or mine ). If you're like me, playing the piano is a personal experience, and its difficult to have that personal experience in a large recording hall. Anyway, that's just my current opinion.

It's been interesting to hear and feel the difference between playing my real piano and my re-creation of it.

It worked following your instructions. Thank you for the help.

God bless,
David

David; did Sforzando do the job for you? Just curious . . .

Tried it in the Sforzando Player. Sound great so far. The velocity level is a bit strange but i haven't done any tweaks yet.

Btw: Is there a hint how to save the instrument in the ARIA Player permanently? It's gone if you start the player before turning on the instrument. Same issue on the Garritan CFX stand alone player

I have no idea how to use VST's, and I'm a beginner only, but... I recognize a nice piano sound and nice playing when I hear it. Congratulations, Gamma1734 – on both!

I loaded this in the Aria Player and played it and something is very very wrong:

1. The notes are cut off immediately on note release which makes it sound robotic with shorter notes.
2. This is even weirder in the highest notes where there are non-damped strings and you can hear the resonance only while holding the keys.
3. The touch response is pretty weird, it starts off soft and would suddenly switch to some loud samples with a jump.

Needless to say there's no re-pedaling, nor half-pedaling but that should be expected.

Is this because I used the Aria Player and the SFZ file and not the Kontakt files? Is it different in Kontakt?

Other than that, if I hold the keys, it is a nice roomy reverb and a nice piano sound

Not sure what you mean by "gone". It's deselected, but you can quickly reselect it by clicking on the bank and navigating to it in the User menu. But then I have only that menu and another one, and only this one piano, so if you have a gazillion I see the problem.

After having tried to play it briefly on my piano (NU1) connected via USB and audio to my computer (recent MacBook Pro), my outcome is always the same as with any other virtual instrument I tried. There is nothing like "the real thing". I find the sound very different from a real piano. The weird thing is that even recordings on youtube, played by same computer and amplified via the same line in in the piano sound way more realistic to my hear.

I conclude that I am too much of a noob of sound engineer. I could not even open the file, granted that it sounds bad. Let me just give up: everything I try is not an improvement of the NU1 (which initially I considered disappointing). Time to do my practice and improve my playing instead...

But anyway, thanks again to everybody who helped and to Dore for sharing his instrument!

To Dore's comment I want to say: Yes and No. Yes, because it can transport you to a nice place while playing and give you the 'feels', no because it is highly depending on the music. Something like VSL or Garritan might be (maybe) worse for final fantasy or certain kinds of music, but others just require a high degree of control and consistency and... predictability. Like a Mozart Sonata or crazy new atonal music.

With most Kontact piano instruments I have the feeling that if you don't have at least something like 12-13 layers, the result will be "jumpy" (i.e.: you feel the jump from a layer to the next one).

Is this the case for this instrument too?

I'm currently installing Kontakt to see if it will work better than Aria Player.