My attempt to synthesize piano sound

Share
#1

Here’s my attempt to synthesize the sound of a piano (without specification whether it’s a grand piano or an upright piano). It lacks the “metallic” sound and it lacks its higher overtones, but I guess it’s still usable.

NDos’ Piano.vital (395.7 KB)

My ideas were these:

  • I tried dissecting the overtones into three parts, namely the odd harmonics (1st, 3rd, 5th, and so on), the odd multiples of the second harmonic (2nd, 6th, 10th, and so on), and multiples of the fourth harmonic (4th, 8th, 12th, and so on). Each of them is represented by each oscillator.

  • The filters are used for eliminating the 7th harmonic and its odd multiples. This acknowledges that the hammers in a piano strike the point of each string that divides the string by the ratio of 1:6, effectively eliminating the 7th harmonic and its odd multiples.

  • For the higher keys in a piano have multiple strings, I employed a tiny bit of unison detuning.

2 Likes
#2

I see it’s been a while since you posted, but I’ve been experimenting with piano-like patches in Vital recently and was curious—did anyone try layering sampled transients with synthesized sustain parts? I’m wondering if that could help add some of the attack detail people said was missing. Would love to hear how others have approached that or if anyone found new techniques since the last posts here.