PG Music's "The Pianist" - 1000+ played-live classical MIDIs

[liszt1022]

So PG Music used to have this great series called "The Pianist" where you could listen to, watch, sort, read about, and change tempo to over 1000 pieces of classical piano repertoire, all of which have that human element of having been played by a real person (Valerie Tryon in most cases, who also records for Naxos & stuff.)

It was a big help to me in repertoire exposure back in the 1990s. I used to recommend it to my fellow piano students, but these days it's discontinued, and doesn't even work on modern OSes without modding. So I'm left with the 1000 MIDIs where are all named with numbers (001.mid, 002.mid...)

Thankfully I extracted a list from the program back in the day of what MIDI is what piece. Over the last couple of weeks I've renamed all the MIDI files into the actual piece titles.

I've included a .pdf with the contents of the complete 5-volume series. I'm wondering if I should just post a .zip file with all the MIDIs. I don't think there's much interest from PG Music in protecting it anymore, the program is almost 20 years old. What do you guys think?

[isyriel]

would make for a very fun learning resource

[perfect_pitch]

I'm also very curious about this - could be very, very good.

[stevensk]

I´m a little bit skeptical about this "How to become a good pianist without any effort"  -kind of software

[perfect_pitch]

I´m a little bit skeptical about this "How to become a good pianist without any effort"  -kind of software

That's great... and has nothing to do with the topic at hand. These are just midi files, which (I presume) were pianists who recorded a great variety of repertoire on keyboards, and this was then put through synthesizers to produce a nice genuine piano sound.

It's basically bare-bone Music data. Before MP3's - MIDI files were all the rage.

[liszt1022]

I've been playing these through my Kawai digital and they sound just great! I know MIDIs don't sound too good on a computer, but you can get closer to a good sound by doing this:
https://www.informatics-tech.com/how-to-make-midi-files-sound-better.html

[liszt1022]

Well anyway, here are the MIDIs.

https://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=04335537596509826104

[liszt1022]

I've been playing these through my Kawai digital and they sound just great!
Also useful to play some of them at half-speed.
 I know MIDIs don't sound too good on a computer, but you can get closer to a good sound by doing this:
https://www.informatics-tech.com/how-to-make-midi-files-sound-better.html

[mrwups]

THANK YOU, liszt1022 for making available the entire set of "The Pianist" performances by PG music. I had purchased the Valery Tryon set of 300+ performances of Classical Piano pieces released in the mid 1990s on floppy disc and I extracted the midis for use in my Pianodisc grand piano.  Her performances are uniformly excellent and now, to have courtesy of you, several hundred more by other pianists as well, is truly wonderful.

Pianodisc offer a free program (app) called MusiConnect which converts the midis to .wav to drive the piano via the rear of its CD player, but far superior and very much more realistic reproduction is achievable by playing direct from raw mid thru the midi-in port. I have a Mac computer and open and play the midis from MidiSwing, a free app (which I'm told does not work as well on PC). A USB to midi cable connects my computer to the piano. I am able to convert Type 1 midis to Type 0 and to quickly adjust note velocities throughout an entire midi to optimise the reproduction out of my piano, as the original unaltered midis would otherwise play back far too loudly. MidiSwing also permits me to edit sustain pedal, correct wrong notes and adjust tempi throughout. In fact, I am now able to successfully emulate favourite performances of piano works I have on CD, simply by manipulating these parameters, bar by bar through the entire piece.

Another immensely rich source of classical piano midis is the thousands scanned from piano rolls for made for reproducing pianos from 1904 until the 1930s and available for free download from the internet. These rolls differ from standard pianola rolls in having additional perforations which define not only which notes are to be played, but how loudly or softly they are to be played and when the sustain and soft pedals are to be used. I edit these in MidiSwing to enhance the playback through my grand piano.  Performance practice has changed greatly over the past century and these are a valuable learning resource from that point of view alone.

[mattpf]

 Sorry for the bump but
 I have enjoyed "The Pianist" Classical for many years and just
now found out that the series didn't end at 886.mid.  I am extremely interested
in obtaining somehow either the final group of midis. 887.mid to 1087.mid I believe.
or better yet the entire software package.  Any help is appreciated.  I saw a link
here for midis but the link is no longer good.  I was able to get
the pdf listing though.  If anyone downloaded this and still has this file and could provide a link and/or knows of either a Pianist Volumes 1-6 Collection, Pianist Pak 2 (1-6), or even just "The Pianist Classical Volume 6" for sale I would be very interested.

Thank you
matt

[tropicvibe]

Hi, was wondering if anyone still had these midi files and could upload them once again please. Seems liszt1022 old link is no longer working and I'd appreciate it immensely, thank you so much.

[nor251]

Hi,

Please do you mind to share The Pianist midi files again? The link expired, thanks a lot.

[dogperson]

The OP was last online July 2018.  I would be surprised if you get a response.

[liszt1022]

Here

https://danielbrown.vgpiano.com/audio/ThePianistCompleteMIDIsRenamed.zip

[sendero]

Hi, can you please share these midis? I was unable to get them...thanks in advance!

[lostinidlewonder]

You can download this MIDI file I have posted here, rename the extension to RAR when its on your computer and then extract it. Pianostreet doesn't allow rar files.

[dwarde]

OMG thank you for making this available! Back in the 1990's I bought a version of 'The Pianist' that contained 215 Classical and 71 Jazz songs. Like others, I managed to extract the midi files and have recently heard them again in their full glory using Logic Pro (Mac) with various piano synths. I still feel blown away at how well the style and feel of those master pianists was captured in those tiny midi files, some under 10KB (when we consider how much data and computing power we take for granted these days). Forget the utility of the midi files, I think they are a treasure trove of musical history. Even though they are 'only' midi files, the spirit of the musicians is still evident and I am so grateful that someone has actually uploaded the entire series of that PG midi project along with spreadsheets containing detailed information about each piece. Eternally grateful!

[kosulin]

Thank you. The only free online resource with live player midi I knew about was Yamaha competition site https://www.piano-e-competition.com but looks like it is down at the moment. Luckily I made a local snapshot somewhere.

[saxobob]

Thank you lostinidlewonder.  I extracted everything but there are just .db files and .xls files listing the contents of each folder.  Do you (or can anyone else help)... know how to get the midi out of the .db files?

May thanks
Rob

[lostinidlewonder]

The XLSX file can be opened with programs that deal with Excel documents. In there you can see the mid file name and the title attached to it. The db files could be opened with programs such as SQLite database, but I haven't done that before so not sure how that works.

[saxobob]

Thank you very much @lostinwonder.  I can program a little so will do some investigation on the database.

[amc252]

I know this is an old topic but I wonder if anyone has any information regarding the pianists who recorded the jazz MIDI files in the collection.

[lostinidlewonder]

I know this is an old topic but I wonder if anyone has any information regarding the pianists who recorded the jazz MIDI files in the collection.

Read the .txt files