Reviews

May 1997

William Coakley Perfect Piano Series
by Gerry Bassermann
Electronic Musician - May 1997

Concert grand pianos sampled with stunning realism.

There's nothing like the sound of a concert grand piano. Wandering off from a party some months ago, I found myself in a deserted ballroom with a magnificent grand. Seizing the moment, I threw myself down onto the keyboard with bodily abandon, playing a kind of postmodern, dual-forearm cluster. Laying head to wood, I listened to the incredible chordal wave as it roared and danced and endlessly subsided. It was like the sound of everything at once, as large as a universe yet infinitesimally fine.

Throughout the many years of electronic-instrument development, sound designers have sought to replicate the rich, complex sound of the acoustic grand piano. The advent of digital sampling has brought the quest substantially closer to fruition, yet even the best digital "pianos" often sound less than grand. But just the other night, I loaded a new piano CD-ROM into my sampler and smashed the controller with both arms. What I heard called up an astonishingly powerful and detailed memory of my experience that evening in the grand ballroom.

The product is named, aptly enough, THE PERFECT PIANO SERIES, and is packaged in two volumes. Volume 1's principal offering is a 9-foot Steinway D concert grand, circa 1986, sampled on the stage of an acoustically "perfect" theater using various mic positions and equalization. A second piano, a Kawai B grand, is also offered, though with less extensive variations. Volume 2 features what is, to my knowledge, the only sample set of the nearly mythical Fazioli 10-foot, 2-inch piano from Italy; a 1979 Steinway D; and an assortment of other specialized pianos. The CD-ROMs are available in several sampler formats, including E-mu Emulator IIIx/IV, Akai S1000/3000, Digidesign SampleCell II, Ensoniq ASR-10 (vol. 1 only), Roland S-770, and Kurzweil K2000/K2500.

THE MAN, THE PLAN
The creator of the THE PERFECT PIANO SERIES, William Coakley, got into the sampling business simply because he "wanted something decent to play." He had tried every sampled piano on the market and found deficiencies in each, whether mismatched notes or ranges, unnatural velocity switching, strange recording ambiences, or tonal defects in the instrument itself. So he decided to create his own samples.

Fortunately, Coakley was well suited to the task. A stint as a piano tuner for Baldwin (he has tuned pianos for Liberace, Ferranti and Teisher, and Andre Watts) helped him select and prepare source candidates, and many years spent as a professional recording engineer allowed him to capture and process the recordings properly. Moreover, a lifetime of piano playing helped him expertly voice the instruments and gauge the results.

Coakley lavished time and TLC on the project. Some of the sounds that ended up on volume 1, for example, were culled from his fortieth set of samples. Indeed, Coakley produced such refined work that he was eventually prevailed upon to make his disc available to the public.

To date, his marketing style is straightforward and personable: not only does Coakley personally answer the phone and provide around-the-clock tech support, he also burns each CD-R himself and signs, serializes, and registers it before shipping. Though I was initially dismayed by the dearth of documentation provided with the discs, having Coakley instantly accessible by phone more than made up for the scant text and proved a welcome relief from the average support line's voice-mail labyrinth.

VOLUME I
I auditioned volume I on a Kurzweil K2000. There are six banks containing one program each: four of the Steinway and two of the Kawai. The Steinway programs consist of two different sample sets--numbers 28 and 40-- along with two variations of number 40. The first variation has been equalized and the second compressed into 8 MB RAM (as opposed to the 16 MB required by the other loads). For the Kawai, one program maintains
recorded levels while the other has been normalized. Altogether, the six banks comprise 88 MB of data.

Coakley experimented with numerous microphones, mic positions, and recording environments before finding the optimum combination of elements for sampling the Steinway D. The final mic selection remains a carefully guarded secret, but Coakley has revealed that the samples were made in a 1,000-seat theater (though he is loath to say which one). This setting allowed for a big sound free of troublesome reflections.

Program D40, the sampled Steinway, sounds round and clear, with a broad bass end, making it particularly well suited to solo playing. Tonal consistency up and down the keyboard is very smooth, and the stereo image is wide and consistently present across the middle. No sample zones stick out unnaturally or are uncomfortable to play. Clearly, Coakley selected a first-rate instrument, one that is free of hammer knocks or weak-sounding areas of the sounding board.

It's also evident that he carefully tuned the piano and maintained the tuning throughout the sampling process. If only one of a piano note's three unison strings is slightly out of tune, the note will suffer a considerable loss of sustain. On the D40, the ease with which the player can bring out a singing melody in the right hand over a full, arpeggiated bass and chordally dense midrange testifies to a high standard of intonation.

To further ensure a balanced sound, Coakley took pains to map his samples carefully. The D40 piano has enough samples (around twenty per layer) so that none have to be transposed more than a few semitones by the sampler. Still another technical achievement is the smoothness of the Velocity-controlled switching between different dynamic layers. The layers of the D40 are so well employed, that there is never a feeling of switching samples, only a natural and expressive touch control. All of these elements together made playing the Steinway D40 program from a weighted, 88-note Wersi controller quite satisfying.

The only less-than-satisfying thing is the timbral reduction that occurs 2.4 seconds after notes are struck. Coakley has programmed the set so that nearly every sample enters a single-cycles loop at this point. His reasoning, as the documentation states, is that "greater than 90 percent of all playing consists of note durations less than 2.4 seconds."

I guess that's true in general--and believing it certainly helps when you need to fit all of those 44 kHz stereo samples into 16 MG of memory! But the lower notes of a piano, which use long strings with brass windings, are distinguished by having a dynamic spectral shape. When those unwinding timbres turn suddenly static after 2.4 seconds, it's disappointing. Though the reduction is hardly noticeable if other notes are played before the 2.4 seconds is up (so you won't notice it under most playing conditions), I would have opted for longer bass files with longer cross-fade loops and successively shorter--and, if necessary, fewer---samples above, say, G4.

The other pianos on the disc evidence equal attention paid to such details as intonation, sample mapping, and cross-switching, but theses samples are quite different in character. The Steinway D28, for example, has a more introverted quality than the D40. Curiously, thought, it seems to be more dynamic, perhaps because there is more tonal disparity between the layers. The Kawai B has the fresh presence of a fairly new piano. Unfortunately, though, it has some frustratingly short envelopes in the center octave. The equalized version of the Kawai (which is not looped) cuts through thick textures easily with the hard layer adding very metallic highs.

VOLUME II
Released late last year, volume 2 reflects state-of-the-art developments in sampling hardware: memory is now in abundant, affordable supply (with 32 MB the standard configuration), and polyphonic-voice capability is steadily on the rise. I reviewed volume 2 on my E-mu Emulator IV, which has 128 note polyphony, so that I could throw some romantic
blockbusters like Chopin's "revolutionary Etude" at the pianos in Coakley's second disc.

The main event on volume 2 is the Italian Fazioli concert grand piano. Known to players and technicians around the world, the Fazioli has an unsurpassed reputation for excellence. Of twenty or so extant, there is only one in the Americas-- the one that Coakley sampled. Coakley traveled to hear and play it, met with Paulo Fazioli, and convinced him that he was the right person to capture the sound of this beautiful instrument.

My first impression was that this is a very large sound with a palpable sense of depth as well as a wide, full stereo image. (At ten feet, two inches, the Fazioli is the longest concert grand piano in production.) This is also an extremely consistent piano timbrally, from bottom to top, providing a warm, "woody" tone throughout. The various samples work together like a pure conspiracy of sound. I think it's the closest I've come to the acoustic grand experience in my MIDI studio.

Though similar sounding, the "F1" piano is actually a hybrid of piano source materials, definitely part Fazioli but with, I think, some Steinway thrown in for good measure. It is absolutely brilliant and is my personal favorite on the disc. The right-hand melody range (fourth and fifth octaves) sings with little effort over a confident bass and midrange. This could just as well have been the piano with which I had the near-mystical experience that night in the deserted ballroom!

The third offering, "Km EQ," is a piano that seems built for cutting through rock textures, so powerful is its midrange and highs. There's even a hyper-EQ'd version that sounds like an in-your-face tack or lacquered-hammer piano. Neither of the "Km" instruments is looped.

The Steinway on volume 2 has a sparkling tone and features presets with varying levels of dynamic control as well as bass and treble boosts. Finally, there are also versions of both the Fazioli and Steinway that were processed with noise-reduction software.

The pianos on volume 2 require more memory (between 22 and 31 megabytes) than those on volume 1, and the sounds are correspondingly larger. This is definitely a welcome change. Although the bass tones still tend to go to single-cycle loops, they do so after four or five seconds, rendering the reduction effect far less noticeable than on volume 1. Of course, the improvement does kind of make one hanker for 128 MB EIV versions of all of these pianos!

LID DOWN
The two discs composing William Coakley's THE PERFECT PIANO SERIES are as much works of art as they are feats of technical mastery. Creating virtual musical instruments which believably emulate the pianoforte requires not only technique and diligence but discerning musical taste, as well. Coakley is clearly in possession of all three.

Although these discs don't offer the biggest variety or quantity of programs, they do provide carefully distilled, well-balanced, and gorgeous-sounding piano samples-- the best you're ever likely to play.