Best monaural (software or hardware) acoustic piano sound

[SunRain]

I am also with you, OP, I would hate to carry two speakers to practice just for playing a decent piano. I sincerely don't understand why every piano centric keyboard does not have a good mono piano.

[Daniel Heslop]

On 8/13/2018 at 3:37 PM, MotiDave said:

AHA! I knew it! I stared at my piano sitting against the wall a hundred times and have always wondered since I joined KC - how is this singular wooden box device stereo? Which of the infinite possible datum points on this box are selected for these stereo signals. A piano does not have dual outputs, it has no left and right. It is a piano. Sound can be theorized to emanate from throughout the construction, but not from any two particular points I can see.

 

At last, the jig is up, the cat is out of the bag, the truth be told. pianos are not stereo!!!

Pianos might not be stereo, but human hearing is. (actually it isn't for me as I am deaf in my left ear). 

 

Last night I did a solo piano gig through a mono pa with a korg Krome. Everyone said it sounded great. I thought is sounded absolutely awful. I messed with eq all night, and came home vowing to figure out a decent mono sound. I don't even think it is an issue of if the audience is in the right place to hear stereo. For me it is purely a case of a weird boxy ill-defined sound when you run mono, and I'd honestly rather run mono, but I just hate the sound of my krome mono. 

[Stokely]

Problem for me is that the boxy sound you mention also comes with a dip in volume to go with the timbre change.  I do think the piano (like other in-your-face things especially dry vocals) sounds better out front than it does in my in-ears.  That said, the stereo patches--when I can run stereo--sound fantastic.   Tonight is an example of a gig that only supports mono, it's a restaurant at a resort and they pipe the band feed around in mono.   I have learned that it's better to mirror what I'm sending the sound engineer rather than monitor in stereo and send them mono.  I've had them come back and say thing like "your piano/other sound went way down in volume" and they invariably slap super heavy compression/limiting on you.  Tonights gig they hand you a wireless pack and give you the wifi password so you can use an app for your mix (if their router is working, last time it wasn't) so I don't even have the option to monitor pre-FOH with my Rolls headphone amp...I guess if I pressed the issue they could send me an aux as they had to do last time.

I have it as a "to do" to do some recording out front to see if the piano in particular is as bad in mono as it is in my ears.

My ipad is not currently a sound-generating part of my rig after I got an SK Pro, but the news about Pianoteq coming to IOS has me interested.   One might presume that a piano that isn't sampled might be free of the stereo sampling issues 

[AnotherScott]

Yeah, a bit of a zombie thread, but...

 

On 8/13/2018 at 6:37 PM, MotiDave said:

AHA! I knew it! I stared at my piano sitting against the wall a hundred times and have always wondered since I joined KC - how is this singular wooden box device stereo? Which of the infinite possible datum points on this box are selected for these stereo signals. A piano does not have dual outputs, it has no left and right. It is a piano. Sound can be theorized to emanate from throughout the construction, but not from any two particular points I can see.

 

At last, the jig is up, the cat is out of the bag, the truth be told. pianos are not stereo!!!

On 8/13/2018 at 6:45 PM, Doerfler said:

 

Acoustic pianos are not stereo. Digitally recorded pianos are most often sampled in stereo. There is a difference.

 

Apart from the room reflections, many acoustic instruments are point sources (or close to it), so they are inherently "mono" in that respect (e.g. trumpet, flute)... there would not really be any point to sampling these instruments in stereo. But piano is not a point source... sound emanates from an "area" and not from a single point, with different elements of sounds originating at different points in space (e.g. the 88 notes worth of strings). So recording and playing it back in mono and reproducing it from a single point can't duplicate the effect. But with two microphones spaced apart, you could create a recording that better represents the spatial characteristics of the piano's sound. Acoustic pianos are not "stereo" per se, which would imply originating from two point sources, but stereo recordings don't sound like two point sources, they can use the two points to create an infinitely varying sound field between them, which can be used to create a more authentic piano sound. So while acoustic pianos, strictly speaking, are not stereo, they are certainly not mono... and the multi-point stereo recording/playback can capture their natural sound dispersion better than single-point mono can.

 

Personally, I've found that one of the biggest differences is when you start employing the string resonances. In mono, when the resonances completely emanate from the exact same "point" as everything else, they can make things sound worse. Resonances should be coming from different points in space, and when they don't, it sounds less natural, and may contribute to a more muddy sound. So if playing in mono, I think one may want to at least reduce the resonance effects.

[Mighty Motif Max]

2 hours ago, Daniel Heslop said:

Pianos might not be stereo, but human hearing is. (actually it isn't for me as I am deaf in my left ear). 

 

Last night I did a solo piano gig through a mono pa with a korg Krome. Everyone said it sounded great. I thought is sounded absolutely awful. I messed with eq all night, and came home vowing to figure out a decent mono sound. I don't even think it is an issue of if the audience is in the right place to hear stereo. For me it is purely a case of a weird boxy ill-defined sound when you run mono, and I'd honestly rather run mono, but I just hate the sound of my krome mono. 

I did a few mono solo piano gigs with my Krome (the 61 ) when I was tight on space. I had the best luck with the German Dark Grand and German Bright Grand patches IIRC. It wasn't bad actually; the other pianos, forget about it.

[Mighty Motif Max]

On 8/11/2018 at 11:41 AM, Mighty Motif Max said:

Ok, now my actual useful contributions to the list.

 

Yamaha Motif XF User 1 Bank A 001 Natural Grand S6

Korg Krome Bank A 000 Krome Grand Piano

Korg Krome Bank A 020 German Bright Grand

Korg Krome Bank A 026 German Grand Reverb

Korg Krome Bank A 030 Classic Piano (already a Mono sample to my knowledge)

Yamaha CLP-130 Grand Piano 1

These were the Krome programs I was using back then, actually, from earlier in this thread. But I did really like the Dark Grand as well, especially if I was doing more mellow jazz music. Tweaking the velocity curves helped a lot too - I used Curve 3 on my 61, not sure what would be best on the 88.