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Found Pete14 posted a video of someone playing Yamaha P515. I found her another performance and I enjoyed that so much.



Of course she is a magnificent player with different kind of delicate touch. She explained in another video of trying Yamaha P515, Kawai ES8 and Roland FP90. Interestingly, she said that for Yamaha and Kawai it is personal preference. However, she didn't find herself connecting to the Roland sound at all.

Does P515 have ways to capture the key-off velocity? I found her staccato to be very clear.

Yes, the P-515 senses, sends and processes 1-127 Note Off Velocity.

The same performer has posted herself playing a Bach Prelude and Fugue on acoustic. She makes some below-the-line comments on the differences between this instrument and her digital one. She clearly finds that she can express herself properly on the digital.

And this can be adjusted via the app. I like it at max, and it’s not just staccato but also everything in between that is more prominent.

The AvantGrands have this but it is not adjustable; for some reason, Yamaha allows for very little tweaking -except for reverb, note volume/intonation-
I hope that changes for future models.

She is good and her performance with the P515 would sound so much better if she used some reverb. It sounds so digital to my ears... IMHO a good reverb effect is the key factor for a more realistic experience.
That's why Kawai SK-EX Rendering Engine is so much based on better reverb effects compared to the previous piano engine.

First re: Darla's video. Inspiring performance, and I learn a little bit from every such performance I watch: movement of hands, fingering style, position of seat, sitting, hand position etc. The music they produce completes the inspiration. I'm thankful to artists like these for taking the time to make inspiring and encouraging videos like these. I am aging, and I long for the nimbleness of youth, but I'll take inspiration anyway :-)


Re: my current P515 setting. This might "sound" (pun unintended) illogical, I don't know, but thought I'll bring it up:

Since most videos and experts I've watched seemed to highly recommend Bosendorfer for Classical, and inspired by the "Noiseless" piano patches of Kawai digitals, I tried this sound on the P515 and I haven't changed it for about 5 days now (and that is an era in my case):

Select Bosendorfer. Choose your preference for touch (mine is Hard2), or leave it on default. Leave everything else default, but set all resonances to zero, and add a little bit of key-off sampling, just a tiny. Since I pictured in my mind the Bosendorfer to be in a luxurious chamber of some castle - select Chamber and leave resonance at default.

Even through onboard speakers, it's quite an amazing sound to my ears. It's similarly so on the CA79's default "Noiseless" patches for all AG pianos. I'm amazed at the thought the piano makers have put in, to create these different patches and build in to the system. They of course are no replacement for hundreds of gigs of VSTs samples and processing powers of computers, but they do serve to provide quick but great sounding settings.

Now Mozart is very uplifting; his music that is. I find it hard to imagine a lady with her splendid capability would play a 515 willingly unless a VST was in there to at least give something that that piano could not.
Mybe we expect too much from digitals, but she did what she could for that little beast she played. She obviously was more in tune with the music . Good on her!

Personally, I believe that the approach taken by Yamaha/Kawai is the smarter approach.

They are looking for other ways to recreate a piano realistically not only by adding more and more layers on top, but rather by expanding outwards towards the edges; you know, where the good stuff resides.

What do I mean by this? Well, they are adding more modeling instead of just thousands of samples piled like sardines in a tin can; they are giving the user more control over parameters; such as, key-off samples, resonances, note-volume etc.

Yes, I know that some sampled VSTs also give the user control over many parameters, but where they falter is in the one thing they brag about: too many samples and not enough modeling!

There is just no realistic need for 100 layers per key; it is something done for the purpose of marketing, “we have the biggest D in town”. Well, guess what, many have managed to produce outstanding Ds (Steinway) without the excess amount of samples; this, by extension, ends up saving the user a lot of money because the lower-sampled VST is cheaper and requires less storage capacity and perhaps even less processing power.

I have a very old Mac Pro and it runs Pianoteq and Ravenscroft perfectly; I can assure you that if I try to run something from VSL, the computer would be blown into pieces (literally).

Pianoteq is pure modeling. I think this makes Yamaha and Kawai dumb then!

The reason why acoustic piano sounds different is because of the reverberations mixed with vibrations. That's not possible to model at the moment. Why it is usually done is they isolate the strings of a note and they sample it and it will sound very different from when you have the entire soundboard resonating the entire strings attached to it.

Agreed! I have done tons of tweeks with reverb, and eq, and brilliance.

My favorite so far is brilliance 8, reverb 20, damper resonance down to 4 from 5, and eq flat.

Well she picked up a subscriber. This is by far the best video review I've ever seen of a digital piano. It's thorough, clear, articulate, educated and no hyperbole.

Vienna Imperial runs perfectly well on my 2012 dual core Windows laptop with 6 gigabytes of RAM. It doesn't even need and SSD.

The more recent VSL pianos require an SSD, and they run on the same laptop provided I don't use too many mic positions simultaneously (which I have no desire to do anyway).