Question on terminology

[Colleen]

Hello friends--

A return critique I received on a solo piano piece read (in part):
Acoustic piano is awesome, but the easiest way to get a pro sound is with a decent quality VI - there are many great and reasonable choices out there, which will give you an awesome sound and a professionally treated room as well.

I googled VI and came up empty--might anyone know what it means/stands for?

Thnx much
Colleen

[cosmicdolphin]

There's tons of Virtual Instrument pianos on the market.

I like Keyscape for a decent range of different sounds in one instrument but I don't play solo piano pieces so YMMV

Mark

[Colleen]

Thanks so much guys, for jogging my mind!

I have a couple Piano "VI's" (Session Keys and Cinesamples-Piano In Blue) and had started to abandon them because I was losing a bit of an expressive touch with them and because certain notes were tending to buzz with even a slight velocity increase and I was having to Eq this out--thus losing a bit of the original character of the particular piano sound. I've just (thank you) installed Spitfire soft-piano--Very pretty!-- but I am encountering some clicks and buzzes on certain notes there too. I guess there's something I've yet to learn.

[andygabrys]

most piano VI's have all the warts included in the piano sound as a part of its realism.

Some VI's allow you to reduce the volume of the mechanical noises though. That can really help.

[Colleen]

I have the capacity in Session Keys to reduce hammer and pedal noise, but not the buzzing/clipping sound
I use an Apogee Duet audio interface (and a preamp) for real instrument recording--but not possible for a VI, right?

[Ted]

I have a question which is somewhat related to this subject and was hoping for a good answer.

So I've been working on editing some piano midi regions in Logic and there's something really annoying and I'm not sure the best way to handle it.

So lets say I hit record and am about to record a piano part as the playhead advances to the measure where I will begin playing. I push down on the sustain pedal before the measure begins and I hold it down throughout the passage. I need to go back and loop the piano part so I split it at the playhead, where the actual part begins. But the region actually "begins" when I depress the sustain pedal before I start playing... so If I split the region off from the little otherwise "empty" region where the sustain pedal info was laid down, I don't get a sustain on my parts.

I'm sure there are a few different solutions to work around this issue but I'm just curious what would be the best and quickest in a workflow-- can you go back and play the region in "latch" or "touch" and hold the pedal down? I think I tried that and it didn't work.

[andygabrys]

I logic there is a difference between region and track automation.

By default latch and touch write to track automation.

There are ways to get around that.

One of which is to draw in automation in the piano roll or the hyper draw editors.

Especially for repeating piano parts where you need exact sustain on and off.

You can also set your midi merge options in the preferences and record another midi region over top of the existing piano and only do sustain on and off. You will find that that does cause some weird automation that sometimes needs to be cleaned up.

[Ted]

Andy, thanks for the pointers. It would seem to make sense to be able to draw in a sustain "keyswitch" like keyswitches/articulations on other instruments-- but I don't know if there's any way to do it on a piano which has an 88 key range. I should probably do some googling on the subject.

"Midi merge"-- that's a function I haven't used since I was making tracks in Garageband, so I completely forgot about it. I'll have to give that a shot.

Speaking of automation issues... Last night I was using Touch to go through a track and turn a delay plugin off and on when I wanted. Then I would reset to READ-- but for some reason I messed up and wound up in a messy loop of automation not doing what I wanted it to do. All I wanted to do was completely scrap that automation and start again from scratch but couldn't find a simple way to do it-- to just scrap it. So I would have to remove the plugin entirely and then sneak it back in with a different preset.

Really the biggest issue I'm having at the moment is some apparent bug within Logic that is screwing up my bounces. I do a realtime bounce and I have my end of song marker set like normal-- but when the playhead gets to that point, it keeps going and I have manually hit "escape" to prevent the bounce from being ten minutes long or whatever, since it keeps running at the end. I don't know if it's some plugin that I bought lately that is contributing to this, but it's weird. Even when I have my cycle marker greyed out and inactive, sometimes my suggested bounce parameters are a weird section of a few measures in the middle not corresponding to anything relevent. So I have to go in each time and set the bounce to begin on zero and end at the end marker (but usually it keeps running til I hit escape). Just venting.

[andygabrys]

Hey Ted,

It’s not keyswitches - it’s CC controllers.

CC64 is sustain in the MIDI standard.

Automation - various ways to delete automation are found in the Mix menu in the logic menu bar. Way easier than removing plugins etc.

Real time bounce - best in logic to use the cycle region to determine your in and out points for bounce and not rely on the end of project / song marker.

If you already use the cycle region for bouncing it’s another issue that you are dealing with.

HTH.

[Ted]

Hey Ted,

It’s not keyswitches - it’s CC controllers.

CC64 is sustain in the MIDI standard.

Automation - various ways to delete automation are found in the Mix menu in the logic menu bar. Way easier than removing plugins etc.

Real time bounce - best in logic to use the cycle region to determine your in and out points for bounce and not rely on the end of project / song marker.

If you already use the cycle region for bouncing it’s another issue that you are dealing with.

HTH.

Again, thanks for answering those questions. That does help quite a bit.

I obviously don't have the best foundation in basic use of Logic and computers in general-- but I'm trying to learn something more each day. I really appreciate the patience and helpfulness of you and other members who take the time to help.

Cheers,

Ted