For the inaugural Basement page, a bit of music-techie nerd fun.  Due to a misconfiguration of the Moog PianoBar, some of John’s performances have been recording two notes for every one he played.   This causes problems, though likely more subtle than you might expect.  The result is one very short note followed immediately by the same note again.  I’m writing a C program to read the data and consolidate the pair. 

In the picture above, you can see the short notes at the head of each bar (think of the picture as a sort of horizontal piano roll). The easiest one to see may be the top one of the long set of three.  To make debugging the program simpler, I settled on 10 notes, in a sort of stretched arpeggio that I seem to like so much. 

But that’s not the point of this exercise.   The chord above (C-G-C-D-F#-A-D-A-E-F#) sounds really good on a piano - for quite a long time.   What a good test for the Pianoteq piano simulator.  And that’s the sound you hear.

The Pianoteq is actually a program that runs standalone, or in this case, as a plug-in in Pro Tools.  As I recall, it was written by a French piano tuner turned mathematician (to learn how to simulate a piano, mathematically).  It’s not a substitute for a real piano, but it’s not bad and I like to use it in a fill-in or reinforcement role.

I think that a long sustained chord is a good test of how well the piano is being simulated. The stepped line along the bottom of the piano roll is the sustain pedal controller (since “on” is  “high”, in this case up (on the graph) is down (on pedal).  You can actually hear the pedal down, the hammer noise, the sustain and finally, the sustain pedal up.

I think it did better than I expected.   When I played it on the actual piano (1900 Everett upright) I noted how there was this slow, back and forth, high-low resonance that continued up to the pedal release.  In this simulator, the same sort of high-low wave happens, but doesn’t sustain quite as long.

One thing I like about this web page layout is that the image above is pretty large and some of the detail in the track images show up - though this image doesn’t really need it.

Well - so much for the first basement entry.   I’ve got a few more to share in the near future and we’ll see how this works.

-jk