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Embertone Releases: Walker 1955 Steinway 'D'

We sampled a ton of releases based on velocity and LENGTH of note, so basically the piano is "listening" to your playing and waiting to see how long your notes are.
Crazy question: are the release samples based on release velocity too? This is really left field esoteric subtlety (given that so few controllers send velocity with note-offs) and I think the only piano VI that takes release velocity into account is Pianoteq, but it'd be interesting to have a sample-based piano use this information in some way too.

Is there a way to simulate half pedaling without recording a sample set for it?
Might be able to do some trickery with just simple volume reduction on the sample to simulate a faster decay. This might end up being better than nothing, as partial pedaling is a common technique to blend notes.
 
I'd set the day aside to watch all the world cup games. This piano pretty much stole most of that time.

I really want to congratulate Embertone on this instrument. You picked a really lovely Steinway and have captured it's heart - and genuine una corda as well. The mic choices/engineering was spot on (note to lovers of pianos: you're going to want ALL of the mics - they each offer something special). It's wonderful to play (as good as the VSL CFX), I love the GUI and the choices you've made. This must indeed have driven you borderline nuts but I am so glad you did it. Oh..and applause for the staccato samples as well; they're going to be great for adding that extra bit to finished recordings.

There's something special I love about this library. I can't see how there wont be little things that might need tweaking with so many samples under the hood but whatever and wherever they are I kind of didn't care because I've had such a great day playing it.

Right...I think I've run out of superlatives.
 
By key resonance, do you mean, how the piano interacts when you lift the key?
By pedal resonance, do you mean, how the piano reacts when you depress the pedal?

If you hold a chord down and then the damper is depressed, there is no timbre change. We tried crossfading to from sans-pedal --> sus pedal samples upon sustain pedal depress, but that doesn't sound good. We'd consider doing an update eventually that adds internal pedal resonance, but our impression is that it would make very little difference.

One thing I like to do is to shut off the Sans Pedal samples... especially when I want a more cinematic sound. Then I always get more resonance, whether I have the pedal up or down :). I know this is a cheat but it's fun!


Thanks for your reply! Sorry for the confusion, by resonance, I was referring to sympathetic resonance.
a) key resonance - if I press down a key silently (BTW, is "silent key" supported in the current version?), would the overtones of the depressed pitch (of the key) be triggered (proportionally in volume)?

b) pedal resonance - since each key with pedal is samples, could I assume the resonance of overtones is also captured in the sample? If that's the case, there should be a difference in timbre when pedal is added to an already-depressed key, i.e. (no pedal - no overtone vs. pedal = w/ overtones). Maybe I've misunderstood something (?)
 
I am loving a small investment in a great sounding Lite version. I would love to upgrade at a later date, but the little guy is pegging my CPU with using sustain pedal often. I am using a quad core I7 3.4 ghz with 24 gb of RAM. For those of you who purchased the Full with multi mic, are you getting major CPU spikes?

I have a lesser CPU and only 16GB RAM and don't have any issues, but I typically keep my buffer at 512+. I Just assume that I'm going to hit the ceiling during pretty much any given session and have gotten used to the latency. Don't really feel it all that much TBH. That's on a 7200RPM HDD. Pretty basic setup.
 
"... it's because of all the individual zips sometimes whilst it's extracting when it goes to get the new file it can crash the extracting. Doing what he's done (downloading everything first) and then switching it back to download and extract and use shift Reset would work..."

In case this can help someone : I encountered this issue as well, but in my case, changing the options of Continuata to "Download only" didn't even fix it. I've been able to get Connect to work by switching the download method to "Single" though, as I was using the "Multi" mode and it now seems to be working fine.
 
Is there a way to simulate half pedaling without recording a sample set for it?
Many thanks for the reply! Maybe it's possible to simulate half pedal by shortening the 'with pedal' samples to almost no sustaining part of the pedal and then using the release of the key off. Pressing a note half pedal gives the attack of the 'sans pedal' note and then a small bit of the sustaining part of the 'with pedal' sound. Maybe worth a try to experiment with a few samples and see if it works?
 
Many thanks for the reply! Maybe it's possible to simulate half pedal by shortening the 'with pedal' samples to almost no sustaining part of the pedal and then using the release of the key off. Pressing a note half pedal gives the attack of the 'sans pedal' note and then a small bit of the sustaining part of the 'with pedal' sound. Maybe worth a try to experiment with a few samples and see if it works?
I think that Production voices with their product Production grand in version 2 use some kind of script in NI Kontakt to simulate half pedal. Maybe its not a bad idea for Embertone to contact Production voices and use similar script.
 
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I seem to recall the Garritan CFX adding half pedalling in an update which is very effective. Half pedalling on the 1955 would be a real treat.
 
I find it quite difficult & unnatural to half pedal with sampled pianos which support it (Pianoteq is different). On an acoustic piano it's an intuitive thing I can feel though the sustain pedal and keyboard action, but with a sampled piano it distracts me from my playing, so I tend not to get too concerned about it. Re-pedalling/catch-pedalling is more important to me on a sampled piano.
 
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That's the next milestone: keyboards and pedals with feedback where you can feel the sound of the virtual piano. Something tells me it wont be cheap!
 
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That's very impressive. I wonder if external audio could be routed through it to the same end - not that I could afford it, mind. It would be great if that sort of technology could be applied to sub-2k weighted keyboards. Sampling and modelling have made leaps and bounds but the controllers have some catching up to do.
 
Fantastic video demo Alex - a succinct and detailed walkthrough. I'm sure the Walker 1955 Steinway D will be a great success for Embertone, and a superbly authentic and flexible instrument for many pianists/composers/musicians.
 
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