 This piano plugin uses technology that sets it apart from the crowd, especially in terms of flexibility. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The plugin is Pianotech 7 Pro from Moda and in this video I'll be asking what makes this plugin so great. Not only do I think this plugin is great, but I actually think this is the best virtual piano plugin out there. Now that's a bold claim, especially considering that it's got some really good, stiff competition. I'll be justifying that claim with my reasons why at the end of this video, but in order to understand why I've come to that conclusion, we really need to delve into all of the features that you get in this plugin. Now I'm going to be demonstrating some of these using some pieces of MIDI which have been generously donated by some of my viewers. I'll put the names of those pieces of music and the names of those viewers on the screen as they come up. So let's take a deep dive into Pianotech 7 Pro. When you first load up Pianotech 7 Pro, you're going to be presented with this preset, the New York Steinway D. And if you play around with it, it's going to sound something like this. And that's not a bad start at all, but in fact that's just one of many presets. And not only that, but it's one of many pianos. And beyond that, it's actually one of many instruments. There is so much in here. Let's go and have a look at the presets first of all for this particular piano. So we were playing the prelude version there. Let's go to the jazz version to see how different that sounds. And I'll just play you a piece called Strep Cat. And this is from one of my viewers called Sid Thomas. Okay, that's fine, but I think I'd like to try an upright piano now instead of this grand piano. So let's go to the upright pianos down here. You can see there's quite a few to choose from. I'm actually going to go for something unusual, the felt one here. Let's see how that sounds. And let's just switch over to the jazz one. And how about Honky Tonk? So there's an amazing variation of sounds there just from those acoustic pianos. But beyond that, if we go back into these presets, you can see down here, we've got for example, things like a Tynes electric piano here. So we'll just load one of that will load that up and have a listen. Honestly, the list goes on and on. There's not only things like electric pianos like that, there's vibraphones. There's Celeste, Glockenspiels. There's a toy piano in there. You can see things like a marimba, a xylophone, the list goes on and on. It's really quite incredible. So when I tell you that this plug-in only takes around 40 to 50 megabytes of space. Yes, you heard me correctly. 40 to 50 megabytes. You should be thinking to yourself, how do they do that? How on earth do they get so many instruments with so many different variations in there when all of your other piano libraries are huge and they just contain one or perhaps two instruments? Well, in order to find out how they do it, we need to talk a little bit about the technology behind Piano Tech 7 Pro. The vast majority of virtual pianos out there are sampled instruments. So a sample is just a recording of an instrument. Now, most full-size pianos have 88 keys and 88 notes. If we just recorded one of those keys, say middle C, and then we use the software to change the pitch of that recording to recreate all of the other keys, we won't get a great result. And that's because not only is the pitch changing with each key on the piano, but the character of the sound subtly changes as we move through the octaves. So we wouldn't get a great result like that. So there's a bare minimum we would want to really have 88 recordings to represent each key on the piano. Now, added to that, the character of the sound of each note changes with velocity changes. So the harder you press a key, not only does it get quieter and louder, but the character of the sound changes as well. And there could be any number of recordings needed to reproduce different levels of velocity and volume. So a full-size piano, just in a very basic state, is going to need many, many samples, probably hundreds if not thousands of samples. Now, what if we have a change in that instrument, such as opening or closing the lid of the piano? Really, to recreate that accurately, we would have to get another whole bunch of samples. And if we're changing dramatically from, say, a grand piano to an upright piano, then we just need to start the process again. And that's why these libraries are often quite large. Now, if you want a collection of pianos at your disposal, you're going to need a lot of libraries, you're going to need a lot of disk space. Now, that's all very well because you can get great results. And I'm not meaning to put down the piano libraries out there because some of them are absolutely awesome. But there's not a lot of flexibility in that. Change anything about the characteristic of the piano and you have to resample the whole thing. It gets too unwieldy, so we sacrifice flexibility. Now, Piano Tech 7 Pro or the whole Piano Tech line does not use samples in this way. Instead, it's a modelled instrument. That's a way of recreating the sound of the instrument through modelling, through clever logic and math to recreate that sound. That means you can make tiny changes to that instrument and instantly create the sound that you want to create. Now, let's delve into all of those kind of tiny changes that we can make with Piano Tech. The design section, which we can see over here, I'll just open that up, gives us an enormous amount of control over the kind of physics of the instrument or changing the physics of the instrument to change the sound. Now, I'm going to be using a piece from a viewer called Nick Ellison. The piece is called Four Minute Noodle, and I apologise to Nick because I'm going to be messing with the sound quite a lot here. Now, we have a few controls here, which I don't understand the science behind it, but you can definitely immediately get a feel for what it's doing to the instrument just by playing with the controls. We have impedance, for example, up here, which has a big effect on the length of the notes overall. So, I'll just play our piece and then I'll just make the notes a little bit longer and then a little bit shorter. Have a listen. Let's go short. Obviously, that's very, very extreme there, and you probably wouldn't make it sound like that, but it gives you a good idea of the amount of control you have there. We have cutoff, which controls how much of the overtones we're hearing in the instrument. A little bit more subtle, that one. And then cue factor, which controls the sort of drop-off of the higher overtones in there. Moving down from there, some more obvious things like string length are there. That has a massive impact on the character of the instrument. Sympathetic resonance, which is really about the interactions between lots of parts of an instrument, but particularly when you're playing many notes at the same time and the way they resonate with each other and the different parts of the piano. And then down at the bottom, we have even more controls, things like the duplex scale and the blooming down here, which if I'm honest with you, I could read from the manual what they actually are, but I don't technically understand what they are. I'm sorry about that. But again, they just change the character of the instrument enormously. I don't think I've ever seen an instrument with so much control over tuning as this one. If we open up the tuning panel here, of course we've got our basics with, this is set to 440 hertz at the moment. You may wanna match another instrument and change that there. That's a common thing that we'll see in a lot of plugins. But if we click this little symbol here, we open up a whole different world of tuning. Now across, this wheel here sort of represents the 12 notes of your scale, okay? Now you can adjust each of them individually. You can sort of offset them, okay? Now if I play the piece of music here, you'll see the notes appearing there. Now some of the notes in this instrument because of the way it's set up are already slightly tuned off of the line there. That's absolutely fine. But we can further adjust them just by dragging these around, okay? So we can offset those notes. Now I'm gonna make it sound awful, okay? So you can hear what's happening. So that's an amazing amount of control over the tuning. Now there are some standard types of tuning available. And they're available up here with a bunch of presets. For example, you've got Fokker here and you've also got Zalino here. So there's some standard practices in terms of tuning there which you have access to, okay? Another interesting control if I close this panel here, and I'm not gonna go through all of the controls, but what I found interesting was this unison width control. So some of the strings of a piano, or some of the notes of a piano are made up of multiple strings, okay? Now they don't always have exactly the same tension. You can have variations in that, okay? Which piano tuners will do on purpose. Now we can adjust that with this slider here. So I'll play the piece of music again. Now I'm not suggesting that it's very desirable to have them as I had it at that extreme value there. Again, in order so that you can hear I've done that. But when you think about this, this all really does add to the character of an instrument. And by making it sound a little bit less perfect in its tuning, it actually sounds much more like a real piano. Now the output section is a little bit more sort of miscellaneous if you like, but there's some really great controls here for the sound of your piano. I'm first of all gonna take a look at one you may miss. It's kind of small. It's down here by the keyboard and it's the condition control. And if I gradually push this slider up, you'll see that in fact the interface changes to reflect the fact that this is gonna sound much more like an old worn out piano as we push this up. Let's have a listen to this blues demo which comes along with piano tech. And I'm gradually just gonna press this, push this slider up. It gets out of control around about here where the value is around about four or so, but have a listen. And if you've got a local bar with an old piano or indeed an old church hall with an old piano, it may sound something like that one there. I think it gives it a nice character down here if that's what you want. Okay, just making it a little bit less than perfect is kind of perfect in my eyes. Now of course over here, we have controls for the velocity curve. That's very, very common on piano plugins. And then we have note off curve is something we have there as well, pedal and also for after touch. Not gonna go through all those now, but it's nice to see all of those there. Now as we mentioned there, there's a curve for pedals and we have four pedals. As I said earlier, we have this soft pedal which we talked about. We also have this pedal which is the harmonic pedal. So that allows you to play in a kind of a staccato way without having to use any sort of dampening pedals at all. And we now have this pedal here which is the Sustenuto pedal. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. And here as the tip suggests, this allows you to hold some notes even after without having to press down on the sustained pedal. Then of course we've got our sustained pedal. As I say, all of these are not just on off switches. They have values in between as well. And you can assign them all to your hardware using CC controls of course. So lots of flexibility there. We also have some control over the action of the piano which we access here. And then we have mallet bounce which is kind of interesting. We'll just play around with that for a moment. I'll switch it on, have a listen. It's kind of like a little bit of a delay feature, isn't it interesting? Now moving on from there, of course we have an equalizer control. Lots of plugins have that these days. And some effects, a great range of effects in there. We've got delay, EQ, compression, reverb. And if we click on these, you access a bunch of other effects as well which you can assign and control in here. Now I wanna talk about something which I think is really nicely done in this plugin and actually changes the sound of the instrument quite a lot. And that is the control we have over our microphones. If we click here, we get this kind of overview a map of our instrument. In this case, I've got a grand piano selected. So we can actually do something here apart from being able to change the microphones. We can actually open and shut the lid of the piano here which of course makes a difference to the sound of a piano. And then we can assign up to five microphones. I've only got two on this preset but we can change those microphones to different models. They're both on U87s at the moment but I could say select, I'll go for a C414, one of my favorite microphones. So we can do that. And then we can move our microphones around. So we can just grab our microphone from one of the viewers. So from the top view I'll move it out here or move this one out here. We can move them up and down. And we can also point them in different directions as well. This is gonna sound very different now. I think that's wonderfully done. And if we change to a completely different instrument, for example, let's go to an upright instrument. Then it does change visually there to reflect that. So I just think it's very well implemented this feature. We do see similar things on other plugins but this is just done so well. And really the combination of everything you've seen here enables us to have an enormous amount of control over the sound of our piano. As if all of that control wasn't enough, what if I now told you you can do it on a note by note basis for the piano. This is where it gets kind of crazy. But we'll just click up here to go to note edit here. Now at the moment it's on detune but we've got a whole bunch of things that we can change about the instrument. I've just got it on detune because that's just the most obvious thing to be able to hear for a demonstration. Now you can see with this preset here, this New York Steinway D Prelude, that there's already quite a bit of tuning which has been done in the lower end there. And each of these presets you'll notice will have different characteristics in here which are giving them their character. But we've got, as I say, very, very fine control over this. So we can actually take a range which we've got in here with these blue controls and we can sort of drag that up and down. So we can change a range in this case of tuning of the notes. So let's have a listen to this. Okay, it doesn't sound good but at least you can hear what's happening, okay? And then of course, as I say, we can go to individual notes. So I'll just go to this note here and I'll just drag upwards and I'll make this note very, very sharp. Oh, this should be comedy. Chose the wrong note. Let's try this one. Ha, ha, ha, ha. It doesn't sound great, does it? But yeah, you can hear there what's going on. As I say, we've got lots and lots of things that we can change in here. So that is an incredible amount of control, isn't it, over one instrument. I love virtual instruments and I think these days, they sound incredibly realistic but incredibly realistic is not the same as an instrument that has its own unique personality. You hear it, don't you? You hear those drums, for example, that we all love but you hear them on everybody's recordings and they lack any sort of unique style to them. Piano tech, in my opinion, stands out from the crowd because of this. Because of the way it's made, because of the technology involved, it enables you to tailor your instruments to such a degree, you can really create your own unique signature sound and it's that, in my opinion, that makes this plugin so great. Now the next opinion I'm gonna give you is just an opinion. It's not based on any kind of technical background at all. As I've been using this plugin, I just feel that it responds to you in a very much more organic way to the other plugins that I have. Even though they sound incredibly realistic, the experience of using them, the tactile experience of using them just seems a little different. Piano tech feels really, really organic and much closer to the acoustic pianos that I've played. Now, I've made a whole series of videos about plugins, which I think really stand out from the crowd. If you wanna find out about other virtual instruments or you wanna find out about plugins to process the sound of those instruments, watch this playlist right here. Grab yourself a beverage, sit back and binge watch.