🔴LIVE! 6/26 LIVE Q&A

Hey hey, and welcome! Today's stream will be fully open to Q&A! Looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones! Let's practice smarter, not harder!
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Charles Szczepanek is an international prize-winning pianist, has collaborated with GRAMMY Award winners, and has taught music for over 20 years to everyone from his next-door neighbor to finalists on NBC's America's Got Talent. Through Pianist Academy, he now brings that wealth of knowledge to you: the beginner, the intermediate, the professional, or the fellow music teacher.
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[@aBachwardsfellow]

AWESOME session! The piano and room are sounding pretty good -- thanks for clarifying the Danse for me -- I had just got the parts the hands were playing reversed ---

[@antoniomaccagnan7200]

This will be know as the stream where Charles thrashed Pianoteq LOL. Seriously, I was a bit baffled about your remark about Garritan high noise level. Why do you think they haven't managed to lower the noise yet? As you pointed out, that's a strong suit of Pianoteq. On passing, another question, do you layer your piano patches when you play solo?

[@PianistAcademy1]

LOL. Well, to be brutally honest, I’ve never liked Pianoteq. Even if they wanted to sponsor my content and pay for product placement, I still wouldn’t use it 😂. Simply put, it sounds like a digital keyboard. Whereas I don’t think the Garritan CFX, the offerings from VI Labs, and Noire sound fake… they sound quite real to me.
The Garritan product turned 10 years old this year. I think the last update it got was in 2017. Noise reduction has come a long way in that time, but it’s still really tricky to do well. VI Labs employs their own proprietary noise reduction in the libraries they create to make great sustain and pure resonance while still keeping noise at near 0 during the entirety of playback. But the exact reason I love the Garritan (the distance of the piano from the mics) is the same reason they probably can’t do any further management of the noise floor without introducing artifacts that ruin the room tone. Any time you record with a real instrument and with real equipment, you’ll get some sort of very low level noise floor. Even on some of my recent recordings with just 2 mics open, when I want to boost the super high end by 10 or 20 db, I end up “bringing up” the noise level quite significantly in order to balance the tone of the piano to what I want. Add my compression and limiting to that, and I probably “increase” the noise floor of my own recordings by something like 40 db between raw and finished master. When it starts at something like -100 or -90db, it’s still very manageable and nearly inaudible if it ends up being -60 on the final master. That’s still quieter than tape. In both of my upcoming releases, I went through and did my own series of noise reduction on all of my tracks to keep the silence very nearly true silent.
I don’t layer patches from various libraries, but I do mix mic positions within libraries occasionally. Sometimes with various libraries, the instruments aren’t tuned exactly the same way, so layering would be impossible.

[@antoniomaccagnan7200]

@@PianistAcademy1 And still, unlike other libraries, most of the big piano brands allow Pianoteq to use their names (not M&H though 🙂). Could it be only marketing? I find Pianoteq convenient as a base to experiment, at my unprofessional level, since it is Linux native and does not require a gazillion GB or HD space. Since you mention tuning, I was wondering if you had to modify the temperament of your Kawai after the upgrade. Some day, perhaps, I might buy a baby grand and, knowing myself, I'd most likely want to tune it, so I have been reading a bit on the subject. Matter of fact, I think you owe your hardcore followers a video about your Kawai transformation.

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@antoniomaccagnan7200 Pianoteq has a massive following and, like I mentioned on the stream, there are a whole bunch of professional players that love it for a variety of reasons. I do know that the major companies have gotten Pianoteq their instruments to model directly so I don’t think it’s just marketing, but there is definitely an element of truth in the “modeling” of the instruments they say. Between the small footprint, that its very reliable, and also you get a massive number of tones for a very reasonable price, it’s quite the package… I know plenty of studio and live gigging players that love it for those reasons.
I still have a bunch of videos I took during the Kawai transformation!