Pianoteq demo review

David Ellis linked me to Pianoteq, a brand new VST instrument from French team MODARTT. What Pianoteq apparently achieves is particularly satisfying for me, as I had often wondered whether (and when) such a thing would be possible on a PC.

Pianoteq is a piano virtual instrument, but not in the same vein as the likes of Native Instruments' Akoustik Piano and Steinberg's The Grand. Rather than playing back recordings of individual key strikes on real pianos, Pianoteq is a simulation - it models the horribly complex vibrations of the strings and soundboard when a key is struck.

This has all sorts of cool implications - the obvious one being that the vibrations of different strings can interact properly. You also (finally) get realistic sustain pedal response - you can half-pedal, quarter-pedal, or 1/128th-pedal, or depress the pedal after releasing a chord, capturing notes during their decay.

Whether the "nice" pianos Pianoteq produces are as good or as "real" as those of sample-based instruments will be open to debate. I tried the time-limited demo, and the treble range sounded slightly weird to me, but being a decidedly average pianist raised mostly on digital pianos, I'm hardly an expert judge. Try it and make your own call!

Besides, the potential for customisation is where I think this product will shine. You see, with the default patches, the lower treble ranges were rather overpowered by the bass for my liking, but altering the hammer hardness quickly improved things. Then, when I tired of my concert grand, I adjusted the unison width slider (which controls the difference in frequencies across the multiple strings that combine to play a single note), and increased the octave stretch. I immediately had the reassuring sound of a homely beast that hadn't been tuned in a while. You do not get this kind of control with a sample-based digital piano.

Indeed, an eternal limitation of sample-based pianos (both hardware and software) has been that everything they can create is derived from the same set of samples of some huge, expensive, "perfect" grand (or three). But the Steinway sound gets boring, and isn't necessarily what you want if you're trying to be Bill Evans. Native Instruments included a wonderfully mellow upright in their Akoustik Piano package, which was a step in the right direction. But with Pianoteq you can create your own instrument, from the massive concert grand to the cantankerous pub stalwart, via faithful reproductions of tinny early proto-pianos.

That appears to be the beauty of Pianoteq - there are no right answers for everyone, just a big array of variables you can tweak until you find a piano that suits your taste and mood. You can alter dozens of parameters which affect how the "piano" sounds and responds - with the potential to create some entirely new and alien instruments. In that sense, Pianoteq has the synthesiser's spirit as much as it has the piano's. It's not hard to see a future in hardware synths and digital pianos that have piano modelling technology built in.

In case you can't tell, I want the full version, but I'm holding off on an immediate purchase, as I haven't tried playing it through the X8 yet - only the V-Synth, with its decidedly non-piano-like keys. That, and I don't have a job!

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