As a professional pianist that's spent the past couple of years obsessing over questions of tempo, breath, phrasing, movement and musicality, this app really tickles my fancy.
Some casual observations:
- As someone who has delved a little in DAWs and working with MIDI, one thing that struck me is when controlling velocity with on a physical, linear scale, exactly how little extra velocity is needed to voice a melody properly. For example, playing Moonlight on my phone, I play the opening notes as quietly as possible and voice the melody by playing a few bare "millimetres" more to voice it.
- It has really forced me to know the music in a different fashion, as a single, additive rhythm as opposed two hands with two independent rhythms. For example, the first few bars when the melody enters in Moonlight sonata: I wasn't sure if I keep the fidelity of the dotted-eighth rhythms verses the triple eighths, or if I turn it into essential a sextuplet.
- I found that some quicker figures, such as the opening of Mozart's "Alla turca" are best achieved by using the actual fingering I would use in the original. At a certain speed, in order to achieve the rhythmic precision required, I had to use piano technique.... on my phone screen.
> MuseScore has patched the LibreScore App. The server will be down for the foreseeable future until I find a solution (possibly by the end of August). In the meantime you can download MIDI, MP3, and PDF using the browser extension.
I'm actually _not_ a pianist, which often surprises people! I did of course start on the piano, but all of my high level training has been on the organ, and the technique is different enough that I don't feel comfortable playing pianistic writing anymore. I can pretend to be a pianist when necessary and make it sound good enough, but a competent pianist would notice plenty of flaws.
I can't speak to PianoTeq, but I've used both GrandOrgue and Hauptwerk as mentioned in the sibling comment. As a mostly FOSS user, I'd like to be able to just use GrandOrgue, and the software itself would work well enough for that. However, the quality and diversity of sample sets (organs recorded, one pipe at a time, to simulate playing different organs around the world) is nowhere near that of Hauptwerk. I work in a very Anglican music program with an English leaning organ, so being able to simulate an English cathedral organ is important to me. The organs available for GrandOrgue tend to be more German Baroque leaning and much smaller. In an ideal world, you'd be able to buy the same Hauptwerk sets for GrandOrgue, but licensing prevents that.
I once worked on building a GrandOrgue file editor, but the specification is a nightmare. I'd like to finish that project someday though.
PianoTeq is considered the best piano sound. some even argue it is better than a real grand piano (it never goes out of tune) - but only if you have a great keyboard (several thousand dollars!), and sound system (more $$$) They are not known for organ sounds though.
If you want organ sound, then the software to look at is: grandorgue, Hauptwerk ($$$, but reported to be great), Aeolus (simulates pipe via math, the rest work on samples of real organs). There are probably others, but the above is what I see come up most often when this is discussed.
Some casual observations:
- As someone who has delved a little in DAWs and working with MIDI, one thing that struck me is when controlling velocity with on a physical, linear scale, exactly how little extra velocity is needed to voice a melody properly. For example, playing Moonlight on my phone, I play the opening notes as quietly as possible and voice the melody by playing a few bare "millimetres" more to voice it.
- It has really forced me to know the music in a different fashion, as a single, additive rhythm as opposed two hands with two independent rhythms. For example, the first few bars when the melody enters in Moonlight sonata: I wasn't sure if I keep the fidelity of the dotted-eighth rhythms verses the triple eighths, or if I turn it into essential a sextuplet.
- I found that some quicker figures, such as the opening of Mozart's "Alla turca" are best achieved by using the actual fingering I would use in the original. At a certain speed, in order to achieve the rhythmic precision required, I had to use piano technique.... on my phone screen.