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Digital piano sampling banks

Posted: 05 Jul 2008, 06:45
by wilton
I believed that each of the 88 notes on a good digital piano where individually sampled, but thinking about it i'm not so sure. If a digital piano has for eg. 50 sampling banks does it mean that 50 notes are sampled and the other 38 interpolated in some way.
Help me to understand please.

Posted: 09 Jul 2008, 09:17
by athomik
Cheaper/older digital pianos used just a few samples, which then were interpolated between the other keys. Velocity was expressed as a simple function of volume. Modern pianos will have at least one sample per key, but at the top end of the market, you have multiple samples per key. There will be samples at different velocities, with and without the sustain and key off samples. It is largely a function of price and availability of memory. The higher the resolution of the sample (sampling rate) and the more different samples you have per key, the more memory space you need - 64-128Mb is quite common today, but the relationship between the amount of memory available and the quality of the sample can vary from one manufacturer to the next.