andul wrote:
As Steve Jobs Introduces GarageBand 1.0 he said "...one of these (instruments) is a 50.000 $ Grand Piano right on your Mac...", and this was a few years ago! So I expect a certain degree of quality here. I don´t say its totally bad, its the sustain sample which has a failure.
I recorded a few notes. This is on GB 08 standard install and without any modifications except the online update including instruments. I played a single note with and without sustain. Every time when you hear a strange background noise and hissing the defect sustain sample comes into play.
http://www.easy-share.com/1905326472/GarageBand_Grandpiano-Sustain-noise.mp3
If you say this is a minor defect and hardly hearable then turn on your stereo which will provide you with a clear and constant noise level in the lower area.
Thanks for providing the example. That clears everything up!
Sustain pedal on a real piano is not as simple as "now the note plays longer."
The noise you're hearing is called "sympathetic vibration." It is actually produced by the piano itself when a note is struck and the pedal is down. You can even hear confluent harmonics originating from a lower string of the same note that swell up following the thunk of the original note.
For example, if you listen to the "distortion" following the high E, you can hear the harmonic series generated from a lower E on the same piano - allowed to ring because its damper has also been raised by the pedal. If you listen to the "distortion" generated from the high F, it similarly follows an F harmonic series generated by a lower F.
When synthetic piano sounds were first developed, they were overly clean and didn't sound piano-like. It was then acknowledged that a lot of these extraneous sounds that aren't the notes themselves, but are the sounds you actually hear when a piano is played, all contribute to recognizing the replication as authentic. These extraneous sounds can be very complex, and are emphasized to lesser or greater degrees in different sample libraries. How the piano is sampled, miced, etc. all contribute to how much of these extraneous sounds are picked up. However, without them, replicated pianos can sound antiseptically clean, and therefore psychoacoustically fake.
To test this, I first compared your samples with the same notes (dry and with pedal) in GB '09:
Yes - they're the same. This is not a defect in the sample, it's an intentional and integral characteristic of the GB piano sound and it's still there.
Then, using the same high E and F, I compared the GB grand piano samples with what I imagine is a similar model piano used to produce it (large Steinway grand). Indeed, that "distortion" is produced just as you hear it on the sample by the actual piano itself when the pedal is down.
When the pedal isn't down, the lower strings don't have a chance to capture the thunk of the higher note and ring in "sympathy." However, when you put the pedal down and play that high E (especially at the high velocity you're playing it), lower strings vibrate as well, and a wash of sound swelling up around the harmonic series accompanies the original note.
You've become hyperaware of this effect, view it as unwanted distortion, and therefore it bothers you. And it may be that the way Apple recorded these samples emphasizes sympathetic vibrations more than you like. For example, a mic placed further away from the piano would likely capture less of it than a mic placed inside of the piano closer to the strings (although micing close to the strings also gives it a certain "pop" sound they're going for). But that's a matter of taste, not defect.
Other libraries will sound different, and certainly ones costing many more times the entire suite of iLife will sound way better than the included piano sample in GB. However: there is no defect in this sample, and more expensive libraries will also include, and pride themselves on including, sympathetic vibrations.
