Roland V-Piano Review

Sep 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

           
 

THE ULTIMATE IN PHYSICAL MODELING?

Play Me, Please

The fully weighted, 88-note keyboard comes as close to a real piano keyboard as any I've played. Roland's PHA-III (for Progressive Hammer Action) keyboard is designed for quick repetition and emulates a real piano action as closely as possible. The black keys look and feel like real ebony, and the white keys appear to be the slightly off-white synthetic ivory used for fine piano keyboards in recent years. The keyboard's dynamic response is excellent. When I closed my eyes while wearing headphones, I could easily imagine I was playing a miked grand piano in the studio.

However, the action of the individual keys is much more even than I'd expect from an acoustic piano, and I can't predict how much that would change after weeks or years of playing. Considering that my review instrument is brand-new, though, it's likely the action will loosen up considerably over time, as it does with most electric pianos.

Key Parameters

In a real piano, pressing a key moves the damper away from the strings so they can vibrate freely, and then a hammer bounces off one or more of them. Vibrating strings cause every other part of the piano to resonate, and those resonances largely determine why one acoustic piano sounds different from another. The V-Piano emulates the physical characteristics that determine how a particular piano sounds by modeling all of its parts.

FIG. 3: All of the parameters that affect a Tone are available on the V-Piano Editor's Advanced Tone Edit screen, grouped by category.

Nearly half of the V-Piano's parameters let you control the various resonances within a virtual piano. User parameters determine String Resonance, Damper Resonance, Soundboard Resonance, Key-Off Resonance and Cross Resonance. String and Damper Resonance affect the sympathetic vibrations of other strings when you play a note, including strings that are already sounding. Increasing Soundboard Resonance emphasizes the soundboard's contribution to piano tone, and its effect was very obvious to me.

Cross Resonance has the greatest effect on a tone's harmonics, and hence its waveform; the higher the Cross Resonance, the brighter and more metallic the sound. When you change Resonance in the V-Piano's display, you're changing Cross Resonance.

Pianos have one, two or three strings per note. If a note has more than one string, the Unison Tune parameter detunes them relative to one another. When you change tuning in the display, you're changing Unison Tune because it has a profound effect on the overall sound. Stretch Tune, on the other hand, affects an entire range of pitch; normally, it deviates from equal temperament to more closely simulate how real pianos are tuned. Raising the Sound Lift parameter increases the amplitude of playing softly and reduces the overall dynamic range.

One aspect of the V-Piano's physical modeling didn't meet my expectations. My impression from presentations I'd seen at NAMM and online led me to believe you could define the materials from which the virtual strings were made — copper, silver or steel, for example. In reality, Cross Resonance had the greatest influence on my perception of the strings' metallic nature. Like most V-Piano parameters, Cross Resonance offers a continuous range from -100 to +100 rather than letting you select from a list of virtual metals. Hence, when Roland says that a preset Tone's strings are wound in silver or copper, that's a purely subjective impression.

The Softer Side of Modeling

Making major changes to presets, as well as creating virtual pianos from scratch, is considerably easier when you use the included V-Piano Editor (Mac/Win). The software offers numerous views, some providing clever uses of animation. When you move the value slider in the Unison Tune screen, for example, you see a 3-D representation of wood-handled tuning levers adjusting the onscreen piano's tuning pins (see Fig. 2). The Hammer Hardness screen shows the felt changing in size and thickness. You get similar views in the Basic Tone Edit and Cross Resonance screens.

The Advanced Tone Edit screen displays most parameters in a single window. It presents all of the variables that make up a Tone in an easy-to-grasp format (see Fig. 3). Most sections allow individual settings for each string, and each has a button to access a graphical note map. For example, the Tuning page lets you graphically tune individual strings. You can specify exotic or even microtonal tunings and save them within user presets. Most parameters can be graphically adjusted on a per-string basis, making it possible to program a custom piano in which every note is completely different from all the others.

As Real As It Gets

What Roland has accomplished with the V-Piano is simply stunning. Never before have you been able to control so many aspects of a virtual piano's sound — from string tuning and overtones to the hardness of individual hammers. Because you can push the V-Piano beyond the boundaries of physical reality, it doesn't have to sound like a conventional piano unless you want it to.