I’ve dabbled on piano since I was about 6, and even though I’m still not very good, I do know that you simply can’t match the feel of a real live grand piano.
But…after 26 years of playing, I’ve finally found something that comes close. There are lots of great sounding piano modules / samplers out there, but Pianoteq with their velocity curve calibration, simply feels amazing.
Some of the sample based plugins like Imperfect Samples might sound more realistic, but without calibrating the velocity curve I can’t imaging getting the same feel as Pianoteq. (Pianoteq is great for live too with its low memory/cpu usage.)
You’ll see from the difference in my calibrated and original curve below, I wasn’t even able to get close to playing a sensitive quiet note until I calibrated:
