How does the key affect the feel of the song?

[blue2blue]

The curx of the argument biscuit. And I gotta hand it to Blue2blue....the man has a complete understanding of temperment and pitch history in relation to modern standards. And it is conversations like this one that makes HCF such a great place. The sheer amount of learned info that every musician should know but few do, in this thread is fantastic. Unlike the amp forum.

Thanks for the kind words, but, honestly, I feel a bit at sea with regard to some of this stuff -- even though I realize many far more proficient instrumentalists don't know much about it -- or care. In fact, the only reason I know what I know about temperament is because I decided to try to figure out why some of these harmony and pitch issues -- particularly with more or less certifiably 'in tune' digital instruments -- seemed so out-of-tune with themselves. I never liked major triads because of the beat frequency from the the major third being almost 14 cents sharp of the harmonically correct value and the resulting beat frequency. (Now someday I'll have to figure out why the 12TET minor third being almost 16 cents flat doesn't bug me as much. )

 

I know that both HoneyIsCool and I both experienced considerable frustration before we finally developed a sort of common understanding and vocabulary-of-the-moment, but I think the saving grace is that neither of us was so much trying to make points or pursue this as a competitive endeavor, but rather were simply trying to explain ourselves and our understandings of the issues. And, when it got right down to it, it turned out that we really were far more in agreement than either of us realized at the top. Sort of the long way to get back to where you were... but an interesting, if at times, difficult journey.

[blue2blue]

I had an upright grand around that age too. *hi fives* I also had to learn to play around some quirks Just last night I was working on some arrangements with a guy (I'm putting a band together for him.... very fun project!) and was working on a keyboard. I miss my out of tune piano. Keyboards are always in tune but sound off to my ears.

If you ever get back out this way, remind me to take you down to the garage and we can pull my bike out of the way of my piano and annoy the neighbors for five minutes. Last time I played it down there, it was only a bit more out of tune than it was when I moved (I didn't hire piano movers but the tattoo-parlor refugees who came with the truck treated it pretty well and it didn't have to go up or down any stairs). It's an amazing old instrument.

 

When I used to really get into playing it, with its rich and poorly damped resonances bouncing around forever inside it, after a few minutes I'd start 'hearing' what sounded like all kinds of everyday sounds... people talking, sirens going by, even dogs barking... but then I'd pull my foot off the sustain pedal and take my hands off the keys and all those strange sounds would fade away just like that. It's almost as though they were somehow stored in the century old wood and wire -- and, rather tragically to my way of thinking, all those real ivory keys. I'd never take them off but to think an elephant died just to have a nice surface on the keys is sometimes a very strange and bitter thing to consider. (And then there were the once-ubiquitous elephant's foot umbrella holders and waste baskets that were still around, usually in older folks' houses, when I was a kid. Don't start me. I'm just glad that there are finally some laws in place and even enforced to some extent. Elephants are so freaking intelligent. It's scary.)

[honeyiscool]

As much as I hate the idea of poached elephants, by feel, ivory keys are far superior to plastic keys because they are never slippery. Plastic keys have gotten better over the years, but my ideal piano would be an old restored grand piano with ivory keys.

 

I had elephant keys on an old upright when I was 9-15 years old. Real mellow beast, with lots of handcrafted frills, original wooden bench, too. I blame that piano for making me lose A440, since it could never be tuned to it, but the tone was quite excellent, and the action was also quite good for being a century old. Nice and weighty keys. Light keys are nice, but I think light keys for the most part results in bad tone. I mean, just listen to Horowitz. Amazing speed and technique, mediocre tone. I played on one of his pianos. The action wasn't as light as the rumors suggested (people say you can blow on it and play it) but it was quite light. I guess it's fine for people who don't want to play the piano, but want to play the forte, but I'd like to think there's a reason they kept the "piano" as the main part of the name.

 

I am a total piano snob, though. I dislike most rock pianists for sustain pedal abuse and overly bright sounding piano tones from pounding on lightweight keys. Whenever someone sends me a video of some singer songwriter with a piano or something, I can't listen to it because the pedaling is so terrible. If your fingers can't sustain, then your pedals aren't helping sustain, they're just adding mud. As much as I like Elton John as a singer and a songwriter, his piano playing is... merely acceptable to me. Most rock musicians who want a touch of piano should stick to Rhodes. At least that one's hard to mess up.

 

Anyway, I digress.

[Chicken Monkey]

 

I was surprised we made it to the third page without somebody posting it

 

 

You were surprised--I was disappointed.

[blue2blue]

You were surprised--I was disappointed.

CM, you can change the number of posts a page shows on HC under your HC user settings. I have mine set to display 100 posts per page, which cuts down on paging, but more importantly, means I have the first 100 posts on one page and, so, can quickly search for something using the browser's find-on-page function (ctrl-F in Win and, I think, Apple-F on the Mac).

 

That way, you wouldn't have to 'wait' until the third page...

[blue2blue]

As much as I hate the idea of poached elephants, by feel, ivory keys are far superior to plastic keys because they are never slippery. Plastic keys have gotten better over the years, but my ideal piano would be an old restored grand piano with ivory keys. I had elephant keys on an old upright when I was 9-15 years old. Real mellow beast, with lots of handcrafted frills, original wooden bench, too. I blame that piano for making me lose A440, since it could never be tuned to it, but the tone was quite excellent, and the action was also quite good for being a century old. Nice and weighty keys. Light keys are nice, but I think light keys for the most part results in bad tone. I mean, just listen to Horowitz. Amazing speed and technique, mediocre tone. I played on one of his pianos. The action wasn't as light as the rumors suggested (people say you can blow on it and play it) but it was quite light. I guess it's fine for people who don't want to play the piano, but want to play the forte, but I'd like to think there's a reason they kept the "piano" as the main part of the name. I am a total piano snob, though. I dislike most rock pianists for sustain pedal abuse and overly bright sounding piano tones from pounding on lightweight keys. Whenever someone sends me a video of some singer songwriter with a piano or something, I can't listen to it because the pedaling is so terrible. If your fingers can't sustain, then your pedals aren't helping sustain, they're just adding mud. As much as I like Elton John as a singer and a songwriter, his piano playing is... merely acceptable to me. Most rock musicians who want a touch of piano should stick to Rhodes. At least that one's hard to mess up. Anyway, I digress.

I don't keep up with this stuff... it seems like there would be some high-tech material being used on expensive pianos. I do seem to remember that new pianos (back when they were still using ivory) had a much slicker, less 'boney'-textured feel.

 

I suspect you're a bit disdainful of MIDI controllers and virtual pianos ( ), but, I have to say that the first of the two biggest things to happen to my little rig in terms of helping capture more of the feel of playing a real piano was getting an 88 key controller with a fully weighted, hammer-style action. In fact, that, right there, combined with a modeling Rhodes-style VI went a long way to getting me past my adult-life-long longing for a Rhodes. (And that would be Mr Ray 73 -- not everyone like is; sampling Rhodes-type VIs can 'sound' more realistic, but the cheap ones have no 'feel' in terms of response dynamics and, additionally, often sound fake because of decay dynamics and really sound fake when they include things like tremolo, Lesley effects, etc, because the periodicity of the effects is locked to the individual note samples, rather than being 'imposed' on the overall sound -- the 'fix' for that, of course, is to use samples that are completely dry -- but I find the responsiveness of a modeling instrument like Mr Ray to trump the static 'realism' of a (cheap) sampled Rhodes-type instrument.)

 

The other thing was a decent, heavily multi-sampled grand piano VI. (My DAW's deluxe edition comes with a single instrument from the TruePiano set. It's the only heavily multi-sampled piano VI I've owned, so I can't really compare it to stuff like Ivory, but, while there is at lest one aspect that sounds funny to me -- the interaction between open notes (which has two modalities, one where the instrument software simulates sympathetic resonances between strings and one that doesn't -- I prefer the simulated sympathetic resonances but... I'm always bouncing back and forth because there's something 'missing.')

[honeyiscool]

I actually like modeling pianos. You know, TruePianos is actually a modeling piano, but they combine modeling with sampling. I've had some success with mixing TruePianos with a bigger sampling piano to get a very good sound, to take some of the synthiness off.

 

The reason why I like modeling instruments is that it's so hard to, you know, actually record these instruments. Piano is such a hard instrument to capture due to the extreme dynamics, and anything to make it so I don't have to record it myself is a good thing for me. Electric piano seems like not too hard of a thing to model, as evidenced by several good inexpensive/free modeling plugins (MrRay73, the built-in electric piano in GarageBand, etc.). And while sampling instruments sound good, they feel fake when you play them because they often have that thing where at velocity 63 or 64, the timbre changes unrealistically, whereas modeling instruments tend to be more even from 1 to 127, even if at the extreme ranges, it sounds a bit fake.

[blue2blue]

I actually like modeling pianos. You know, TruePianos is actually a modeling piano, but they combine modeling with sampling. I've had some success with mixing TruePianos with a bigger sampling piano to get a very good sound, to take some of the synthiness off. The reason why I like modeling instruments is that it's so hard to, you know, actually record these instruments. Piano is such a hard instrument to capture due to the extreme dynamics, and anything to make it so I don't have to record it myself is a good thing for me. Electric piano seems like not too hard of a thing to model, as evidenced by several good inexpensive/free modeling plugins (MrRay73, the built-in electric piano in GarageBand, etc.). And while sampling instruments sound good, they feel fake when you play them because they often have that thing where at velocity 63 or 64, the timbre changes unrealistically, whereas modeling instruments tend to be more even from 1 to 127, even if at the extreme ranges, it sounds a bit fake.

Yep, that's entirely consistent with my perception, too. But, of course, as I noted, my experience with other commercial piano instruments (stuff like Ivory) is pretty well non-existent.