AB recording studio w/piano

[Guest pop-notmyface]

does anyone know where?

help would be greatly appreciated

[The Byre]

If you are looking for a studio with a good piano, then we have a Bosendorfer 275 once owned by Andre Previn. www.the-byre.com

[Ian]

We recorded there back in june, with MTA, it was really relaxed and we were very happy with the final product.

you can listen to them at http://www.purevolume.com/thetonicsscotland , not that theres much piano in them though (plenty of synths )

[The Byre]

Hi Ian, glad you're happy! Let me know when you get your website up and running, so that I can put a link up to you. Cheers - Andrew.

[threeornothing]

There are no studios immediately in Aberdeen with real pianos....but you could always opt for this

http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?akoustikpiano_us&flash=7

[Guest pop-notmyface]

There are no studios immediately in Aberdeen with real pianos....but you could always opt for this

http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?akoustikpiano_us&flash=7

sorry, i don't trust anyone who spells acoustic with a "k".

[threeornothing]

You'll want to avoid their "kontakt" software aswell then

Failing that, maybe they can mic up that "thing" at cap'n'toms with a 57 (no doubt)....might want to tune it first

[The Byre]

In fact there are only two studios in Scotland that have concert grands, ourselves and Castle-Sound.

www.the-byre.com

[Guest Gasss]

What about the Bosendorfer in Cava?

[The Byre]

What about the Bosendorfer in Cava?

CaVa has had to close its large studio and is now left with just the small room, so the Boesendorfer had to go. Castle Sound and ourselves both have a Boesendorfer 275 with the extra half octave at the bottom. After that, the next piano down the UK in a studio is the Granery near Liverpool, then there's Real World near Birmingham and of course London has about eight or ten studios with good Boesendorfers and Steinways.

A good concert grand costs about 60,000+ which is conciderably more than the total cost of the equipment for most smaller studios, who already baulk at the cost of more than one multitrack or hardware in general.

The number of customers who ask for a concert grand is small, but steady and they bring in quality projects like films, TV ads and of course piano recitals. My wife kicked a bit at the thought of spending all that money on a piano, but it was the best investment we have made in the studio.

[threeornothing]

My wife kicked a bit at the thought of spending all that money on a piano.

Best not tell her the software above only costs 200

I remember on the audiotalk broadcast you were talking about sampling your pianos, but the sheer size of the sample library was ridiculous (9gb?)....NI have got around this by using a "direct from disk" method which means the samples are loaded on the fly off the HDD. It's a compromise lower spec machines won't like (as opposed to traditionally storing samples in RAM) but should mean the quality of the samples are very high. Do you reckon the software would be an investment for a bedroom setup?

[Swingin' Ryan]

Failing that' date=' maybe they can mic up that "thing" at cap'n'toms with a 57 (no doubt)....might want to tune it first [/quote']

I was going to suggest that, but then I remembered the sound it produces.

[The Byre]

Best not tell her the software above only costs 200

I remember on the audiotalk broadcast you were talking about sampling your pianos' date=' but the sheer size of the sample library was ridiculous (9gb?)....NI have got around this by using a "direct from disk" method which means the samples are loaded on the fly off the HDD. It's a compromise lower spec machines won't like (as opposed to traditionally storing samples in RAM) but should mean the quality of the samples are very high. Do you reckon the software would be an investment for a bedroom setup?[/quote']

hmmm, if I remember rightly, I was talking about the cost (in terms of size of RAM) for a synth manufacturer to sample an entire 88-key piano at 24-bit resolution in WAV format and the discussion was about why the sample libraries sound so flat compared to the real thing. (The reason being that they take just one sound per octave and pitch-transpose that, rather than have 88 samples at 16 different volumes each 30 seconds long.)

In theory, there is nothing to stop a manufacturer doing this and perhaps one day, someone will find a way of downloading about 8 GB or whatever it comes to from a hard disk would take about ten minutes using the very fastest RAID arrays. The only way to get around this is to use a hand full of notes and eight volumes. But that means that when two notes are played together, they do not 'beat' (that wah-wah sound of the note phases interacting) together and the sound does not bite through the mix.

Sample libraries and electronic keys are fine for home recording and can be used for studio work as well, as long as one remembers that they lack the sparkle and bite of the real thing.

[spellchecker]

In theory' date=' there is nothing to stop a manufacturer doing this and perhaps one day, someone will find a way of downloading about 8 GB or whatever it comes to from a hard disk would take about ten minutes using the very fastest RAID arrays.[/quote']

not wanting to be a pedant or anything, but with a couple of striped (raid 0) 10k scsi disks you can get 100Mb/s sustained transfer rate. That would take 80 seconds to read 8Gb, approximately.

[threeornothing]

10 seconds for 8gb?...how many bits in a byte? It would probably be more like 640 seconds....but hey, who needs to load 8gb at once, the software above reads each sample on the fly when it needs, as you press a key on your midi keyboard. Whats a sample? (file size wise)

The trick is in having a computer which is fast enough to detect the keynote and velocity, then load and play the appropriate sample at the appropriate level. I believe each note is an individual sample, and not transposed samples....

[spellchecker]

10 seconds for 8gb?...how many bits in a byte? It would probably be more like 640 seconds....but hey' date=' who needs to load 8gb at once, the software above reads each sample on the fly when it needs, as you press a key on your midi keyboard. Whats a sample? (file size wise)

The trick is in having a computer which is fast enough to detect the keynote and velocity, then load and play the appropriate sample at the appropriate level. I believe each note is an individual sample, and not transposed samples....[/quote']

erm.... eh?

i said 80 seconds for 8Gb. 100Mb/s sustained = 1Gb every 10 seconds so 8Gb in 80 seconds.

The software would infact be a lot smarter than just loading samples as required, i reckon. there'd be a fair amount of pre-fetching into memory, not to mention note fetching/guessing based on the key(scale) being played.

if the sample database is 8gb, and assume that there are 88 notes, each with 8 different samples for different velocities, then you can assume that there could be a sample count of 88 * 8 = 704.

so you could guess that at 8gb, the size of each sample was 8gb / 704 samples which is approximately 11.4mb per sample.

even though this can be sustained with most hard drives (11.4mb/s), consider that most samplers or hardware keyboard synths will have a polyphony of about 32, 64, or even 128. guess that polyphony is 64, and that half the polyphony has been cached and you still will need 32 * 11.4mb/s = over 350mb/s.

So you can guess that the sampling software is smart; it must be predictive and cache intuitively. it is not simply a case of having fast hardware, though i'd estimate with slow hardware something such as the PMI bosendorfer plugin would really, really suck.

i'm pure dead drunk by the way.

[threeornothing]

Arrrr....I don't know what I be talkin' bout....

[The Byre]

Of course we can do it (and spell checker is right, at 100 MB/s minimum bulk transfer rate, the figure is 80 seconds, but remember Big-B means byte and Little-B means bit!) using really fast RAID arrays and good SCSI cards. In fact we could do it allot faster than that.

The question is one of COST. Even buying all that stuff direct and by the container load, it would add many thousands to the cost of the machine.

OK, the sounds need heavy tweaking to make them sound real, but our Triton and Karma synths hold hundreds of samples by just storing one sound and creating the different notes by multiplex shifting.

One day it will be possible to do these things, but given today's technology, it would be prohibitivly expensive. Imagine sampling a Hammond organ - every note and every drawbar!

The big, big problem with a sampled piano is that the sound changes according to how hard you hit the key. If you hit a good piano really hard, it sounds percussive, almost like a bell. If you press the key softly, it sounds almost like an organ. Mellow, smooth and round. That means that you have to have samples for a whole range of volumes.

And this is true for all intruments that have dynamic range. The greater the range, the more volume levels have to be sampled. A Rhodes E-Piano can get away with about four and a bit of volumetric cross-fading, a harpsicord just needs one.

[spellchecker]

just thinking about it all, wouldn't it be a lot easier to just use flash memory? if they can make a 4gb ipod for a couple of hundred, then surely at bulk you could integrate 8gb of flash into something for about the same.

[The Byre]

No, because the random access time has to be below 5ms (the time between pressing down a key and the machine making a sound). I do not know what Flash memory speeds are, but I doubt that they are that fast.

[spellchecker]

!!!!!!!

there is no seek time for any kind of solid state memory, and access times are measured in nanoseconds, we are talking several orders of magnitude less than a single millisecond!! it is definitely fast enough!

[Tav]

just thinking about it all' date=' wouldn't it be a lot easier to just use flash memory? if they can make a 4gb ipod for a couple of hundred, then surely at bulk you could integrate 8gb of flash into something for about the same.[/quote']

That sounds pretty good...I wonder if it would acctually work. With no spinning disk to worry about I think your right about the tiny seek time. Quick get to the patent office!

[threeornothing]

I now own the Akoustik software I mentioned above, so if you still haven't recorded your piano mr pop face, send me it in MIDI and I can render it on either a Steinway D, Bechstein D 280, Boesendorfer 290 Imperial or Steingraeber 130, with either Concert Hall, Cathedral, Jazz Club or Recording Studio accoustics

Check the samples for an idea of the sounds

http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?id=apianodemos_us

[threeornothing]

That sounds pretty good...I wonder if it would acctually work. With no spinning disk to worry about I think your right about the tiny seek time. Quick get to the patent office!

They already got around this cost effectively by pre buffering only the first 20ms or so of the sample in RAM and loading the rest of the sample on the fly direct from disk...with todays 7200rpm disks being as cheap as they are...this is the best solution.

I have a great drum sampler (BFD) where each drum hit triggers various samples at once (eg. snare hit will trigger snare top/snare bottom/overheads/room/floor PZM's) with up to 128 velocities.....thats a lot of samples being triggered, and would never work direct from RAM..