If you take a look at this long indulgent post I wrote the other week on the question of Pianos I have Loved, you’ll see I included a Steinway D in that list.
Well, I will probably never be able to afford one but I now occasionally have access to a Steinway B and I like it rather a lot and at some point in the future I might be able to find space for one in an apartment. It’s the second Model B that I really liked playing – a few more and I’ll assume that like Ds, they are safe to order sight unseen (but let me visit the factory anyway) – I tested one in Steinway Hall in Paris (I love that place but don’t go often enough). In the end I didn’t buy the Ronisch I was looking at (mentioned in that long post) because the current apartment isn’t really suitable for a piano, more for the health of the piano than anything else (it gets extremes of humidity and heat and I didn’t think this was good for a 1930s piano that Rach might have played. Someone else apparently has bought it so it will forever be the one that got away).
So I will set up a savings plan for the Model B and hopefully by the time I have enough money, I will also have a suitably modern climate controlled apartment to put it in. The question is, what am I doing in the interim without a beautiful grand piano? Well, at some point, I came across something called Pianoteq. I have a digital Kawai, a CA59 which I bought during the pandemic (and thus had to wait a long time for delivery) and while I like it very much to play physically, I wasn’t all that lost on the selection of sounds – there are a couple of nice grand piano sounds but for some reason, they didn’t always float my boat (if you have one of those pianos, I like the Warm Grand sound). Anyway, the plus point about having a digital piano is that you can use it as a Midi controller. I wasn’t really in a hurry to go messing with that side of things until I started making recordings on it and figured I should learn a bit more about the capabilities of the piano beyond the on/off switch, the volume control and the sound selecting bit.
Pianoteq is a piece of software developed at the University of Toulouse and it is a physical model of various piano sounds. During the year they released a version for iOS and either an ad popped up in Instagram or YouTube or I saw it mentioned in one of the piano magazines. The reviews on YouTube are sparkling to say the least. A high proportion of people using this software state it is the best piano emulator and they have licensed some sounds not present on my Kawai, curiously enough, the two Steinway Ds (both New York and Hamburg), the Steinway B, a number of C.Bechsteins and some instruments from historic collections. And then some. They allow you to install for test purposes, and kibosh the test system by a) blocking some keys and b) going silent after 20 minutes or so (but you can restart). I had some issues configuring it which may be linked to the Kawai more than anything. Also, I learned that the Bluetooth lag to Apple AirPods is … long.
So my set up, despite cables being connected, is a Bluetooth connection from the piano to the iPad into Pianoteq and wired headphones into the iPad and that works okay for me. There is a very, very, very ickle lag.
What to do I think of it? Well, I bought the software after some testing (so yes, I liked it). I bought the entry level licence plus some additional instrument packs. It’s not exactly cheap but it is a licence rather than a subscription and you can run it on any of your appropriate devices (eg, a Windows machine or a Mac) without having to cough up more. You get two instrument backs with the basic licence which you can choose – I added the Steinway D pack and the C. Bechstein pack, and then I separately added the Steinway B and the historic set which included a 19th century Erard. I really liked that sound testing.
It costs less than an actual Steinway B and so far my Kawai isn’t cribbing about the humidity that I sometimes suffer in the summer. As a stepping stone to my dream piano, it fits my needs. On the downside, even though it does cost less than a Steinway B, there’s an upfront cost. Your mileage may vary on whether you want it or not. For me it has joined the toolset. And I hope it will support some more recordings out to my Soundcloud channel as apparently I can start running things through GarageBand with it.
I used to dream of all this sort of musical freedom when I was 15 years old.