Hi Robbie and MMD readers!  My original letter was in reply to the
request by Charles Davis, "Seek Piano Rolls by Charley Straight,"
in MMD September 18, 2004.

Some direct replies to my letter in MMD of October 5, 2004, "Use
a real piano when recording," suggest there might be controversy.
Good!  "Iron sharpens iron" (Proverbs 27:17).

Computer simulations of pianos is a constantly-improving art, and it
makes wonderful things possible.  But as compared to the live piano
sound, it has a ways to go.

I love music as it exists in the real world.  Real pianos in real rooms
have that "live" sound, because of the endless sympathetic vibrations
excited by all those strings and all that wood.  Certainly the old
Folkways and Biograph recordings did not employ perfect pianos and
perfect rooms.  1920's ragtime players often played on pianos that had
a lot of texture and personality.

>From time to time, people offer private recordings of band organs,
etc., and some of them come complete with environmental sounds and
interruptions of all kinds.  The results are exhilarating.  If we
can identify and eliminate flaws, fine, but all I cry for is, "Please
keep the piano itself!"

The Allen organ people work hard at deliberate random pitch shifting
and intonation variance to try to mimic real airflow and pipe behavior.
My ears tell me that the computer piano simulators have a long ways
to go before even half of the resonance phenomena of string and pedal
behavior is accounted for.  And say, you great piano tuners out there:
What do you think of the tuning behavior of computer piano fonts as
compared with your preferred tweaking methods for acoustic pianos?

Jim Neher

 [ I didn't find several related articles because the pianist's name
 [ was misspelled.  It's Charley Straight, not Charlie!
 [
 [ The piano recordings using the "sound font" method are indeed
 [ real pianos.  Most of the time the record producer wants the
 [ "Steinway sound" or the "Yamaha sound", but it's equally possible
 [ to create the "Bar Room sound" with sound fonts.  By extension,
 [ all the groaning and wheezing of old player pianos and orchestrions
 [ could also be recreated.  But normally the producer chooses to
 [ produce a recording that sounds like what his customers typically
 [ expect from him, and that's the sound of the studio or concert hall,
 [ not the sound heard on most old 'nostalgia' recordings.
 [
 [ Audio recordings of piano rolls may be heard as the MMD Sounds site,
 [ http://mmd.foxtail.com/Sounds/index.html  Listen to "Boll Weevil Blues"
 [ played by Eubie Blake, and an unknown artist performing "Cry-Baby
 [ Blues" (maybe Rudy Erlebach?).  These examples were created with the
 [ sound font method:
 [   http://mmd.foxtail.com/Sounds/BollWeevil.mp3
 [   http://mmd.foxtail.com/Sounds/mel4545.html
 [
 [ -- Robbie