Your digital piano sends instructions to the virtual instrument via MIDI signals. Even with acoustic pianos, you might have a preference for one company’s tone over the other. On most digital pianos, you’re locked into one or two piano brands. Lastly, part of the fun with VSTs is finding an instrument sound that you like, and being able to tweak the sound to your tastes. In this sense, going the VST route is an investment, and it’s saved me from wanting to upgrade my digital piano just to get a better sound. But here, too, VSTs can help: you can maintain the same great sound at any point should you want to upgrade to a higher quality keyboard (like a Kawai VPC1) down the road. Of course, a more expensive piano will likely have better keys. Whether it’s a $300 digital piano or a $3,000 one, it can sound amazing, though you’ll at least want something with weighted keys for proper playability. Heck, you could probably pick up a used digital piano off craigslist as long as it’s not broken and it can output MIDI, you can make it sound great. While that can be more efficient, your PC nonetheless still has more processing power to work with for added realism.Īll this means that you can get way better sound for less money by pairing a relatively inexpensive digital piano with a powerful VST. Other digital pianos are instead ‘modeled,’ meaning they instead try to mathematically recreate a piano’s sound. Some of the instruments on this list have thousands of recordings per key, covering every which way you can play a note. You might have one ‘sampled’ recording at soft playing, one at a medium, and one at a hard level, with some added processing tricks to try and blend these samples for intermediate values.īut while the samples on a typical digital piano are measured in megabytes, a good piano VST will use typically use gigabytes of storage for a single instrument - sometimes hundreds of gigabytes. Long story, erm, long: Most digital pianos work by taking a few recordings from some real piano, and then playing them back when you press a key. Long story short: Your PC has way more storage and processing power than any digital piano can muster. Why is a piano VST better than the sounds in my digital piano? Having a piano sound you truly enjoy can be the difference between being inspired to make great music and leaving your piano to collect dust, so I hope this list will help you lean towards the former. In this article, I wanted to expand on some of my earlier suggestions, while providing several more options to consider.

Instead, you let your PC handle the heavy lifting using software colloquially called a piano VST (virtual studio technology), also known as a piano library or simply a virtual piano.

The trick is you don’t use the sounds built into your digital piano.

Vi labs ravenscroft 275 purchse