I was delighted to hear a few days in Herb's video that a Steinway will be recorded in Stage B in the coming year. I was less delighted to hear that it might be the existing Steinway D. That would not be a good idea, but there are good alternatives.
The reasons sampling the existing Steinway D in Stage B is a bad idea:-
- The existing Synchron Steinway D was perhaps the most heavily criticised of all the VSL pianos to date upon release. Part of this was the harsh sample calibration, but part of this was the instrument itself. Putting that instrument in Stage B will potentially exacerbate that problem.
- Most potential purchasers will already have the Synchron Steinway D. They will not want to pay full price for the same instrument sampled in the same way, but just in another room. Some have already said so openly. Sales will likely be lower, or a significant discount will have to be offered to existing Synchron D owners; either way, revenue will be impacted.
- The VILabs Modern D has been relatively recently released to widespread acclaim (N.B. I am entirely neutral/unassociated with any company, for avoidance of doubt, and in fact my number one preferred instrument remains the VSL CFX). The existence of this provides exceptionally strong competition and again may impact sales.
It has been suggested that a vintage D may be sampled instead. That would certainly be a much better idea, but it's still less than idea. Bear in mind the existence of two widely used vintage Ds already (the Ivory American D and the Embertone Walker D); the former is reasonably playable with average sound but just one mic location, while the latter has excellent sound on the whole but playability and performance problems. Users focused on either playability or sound may be content with one of those; it is possible to produce an instrument to surpass both of them in both areas, but you'd need to be on top of your game to do so.
In my view, a much better idea would be to match up the smaller Stage B with a similar smaller instrument - a Steinway B. This widely used and appreciated mid-sized grand has several advantages:-
- It would work particularly well in the smaller Stage B space.
- There is an existing set of 25 Steinway Bs hand-selected by Martha Argerich for exceptional quality. Sampling one of these would guarantee the quality of the instrument (I'll leave you to think about the marketing opportunities!), if it were possible to borrow one for a period of time.
- The Steinway B is widely played and would attract a lot of interest.
- The Steinway B has very little competition in the VST sphere. Pianoteq modelled one, but like all modelled pianos, it suffers from obviously artificial sound in some registers. Synthoy included one in their Ivory Studio Grands, but while surprisingly playable, this suffers from very muffled sound as well as the usual limitations such as a single mic position.
Obviously it's up to you at VSL to decide on your plans, but speaking as someone who has tested a lot of piano VSTs over the years, I can say categorically that I would buy a well-sampled VSL Studio Steinway B, and I would be unlikely to buy a VSL Studio version of the existing Hamburg D. A lot of other people will be in the same position.
Finally, whatever you decide to sample, based on your various releases in the last five years, and those of others, keep the following in mind:-
- Sampling una corda is now a must. You have gotten away with it up to now, but your strongest competition (in terms of quality and popularity) - the VI Labs Modern D and the Garritan CFX - both have sampled una corda and it is very noticeably absent in the VSL pianos. An equivalent sound cannot be achieved through filtering, as you have ironically demonstrated by your previous attempts. Please take this seriously; I appreciate it takes longer to include this but this should be considered no more optional than sampling all of the keys, i.e. omitting this is equivalent to omitting the black keys and stretching the white key samples instead. That would be inconceivable to you; so should omitting una corda.
- Pay attention to sound stage. If you play a scale in a player position, it should sound as though it is moving from left to right essentially uniformly, as in an acoustic instrument. The majority of VSTs make errors in this, and to be honest, the VSL instruments are similarly not great in this regard. You offer excellent options for delays and panning etc., but that cannot fix a fundamental problems of notes sounding from the wrong virtual locations. This is important for maintaining the illusion of playing an acoustic instrument.
- Calibrate the robot. Playability is a real strength of the VSL pianos - undoubtedly helped by the extensive layer sampling - but by far the most playable VSL piano in my view is the CFX, and it is notable that this is, as I understand it, the only one that did NOT use the robot. I appreciate the need to use the robot in the absence of an alternative mechanism (certainly much better than using a human), but clearly there is room for improvement in the calibration in order to reach CFX levels of playability.
Good luck with whatever you choose and I look forward to trying it out in due course! 😄
