Katsaris Passing off MIDI-augmented recs as Real?

[fftransform]

For example:

Others have recently cropped up on his channel, though I doubt it's actually him posting them there.  Can't verify with 100% certainty, but myself and several others have noticed this.  Anyone with audio editing experience?

Some passages have nail clacking, but it itself sounds wrong and sample-repeated.

[lostinidlewonder]

Sounds like real playing to me, what parts concern you?

[ranjit]

It's really hard to make a midi sound convincing. Of course, sound engineers will take various takes and splice them together. This may be why the recording sounds excessively "clean", at least to my ears. Could you provide a timestamp?

[perfect_pitch]

Well, I'm no expert in the matter - there did seem something quite jarring about the recording you posted. It's too clean in the decay of the notes, and when it gets quite loud there seems to be an absence of harmonic resonance on the other strings.

On the other hand, we know Katsaris can play, so I don't see why he would do it though. Had you said Richard Kastle though, there would be credibility to your suspicion...

[ahinton]

Writing as one who has undergone the unfortunate experience of listening to some music that was passed off as a live piano performance but which was without question a MIDI, I can say that I have no reason to doubt that what is posted above is a genuine live performance by Katsaris whose considerable facility is well known; whether or to what extent it might have been edited I cannot say, but I have no reason to suspect MIDI involvement here.

Best,

Alistair

[johnlewisgrant]

Short answer: why would he risk his career that way?
Long answer: depends what you mean by “Midi”.   In theory a pianist could record on a Bos or CFX Yamaha Grand, hooked up to a midi player, microphones in play, and midi record his performance.  The performance could be replayed on the instrument by the MIDI machine, without Midi-editing, but perhaps with adjustments to mic placement, to improve the recorded sound.  Is that “midi”??

Make it interesting: one midi edit is made to the performance.  Is that any different from an analogue splice?   Hmmmm.

[Bob]

Interesting.... I could see it being fake.... What if you slow down the grave notes and see if they're perfectly even?


The decay does sound abrupt, but couldn't that be the mic placement or recording?  It sounds very precise for the tail of the notes... which seems odd.

The double octave grace notes are slow and then speed up though... How else does a human do that?

Where are the environment sounds?  If someone was really sneaking you could fake the recording and then add in extra crap sounds in the environment.



Now I'm reading comments.  I thought people were saying it was MIDI when I glanced through before.  Imagine having your performance perfected enough that people think it's MIDI.....  There still is that decay though....  If it was fake and MIDI I was thinking that might be something like a goal to practice toward if you make a performance that clean.   And then I was also wondering what "MIDI" recording would mean, the same as the johnlewisgrant -- Just connect an acoustic piano to MIDI and tweak it enough until the MIDI control is right where you want it.

[johnlewisgrant]

I mention Bos and Yamaha because they market concert grands equipped with very precise midi machines.  Ergo a pianist who records a performance on a “midi piano”, so to speak, could in fact make midi edits and THEN make an acoustic recording (like any other piano recording) which would from an purely acoustic standpoint be indistinguishable from the real thing.  What might give away the editing would therefore be oddities, such as artificially perfect technique or, as suggested, impossibly abrupt tempo transitions.  Listeners with a Czerny-like reverence for equal finger strength might appreciate absolute uniformity in, say, octave runs.   But a Chopinesque ear might want to hear the natural unevenness that a “normal” set of fingers tends to produce.  I’ve put a lot of experimental midi stuff on YouTube and soundcloud, mostly Bach, just because it’s interesting (to me) to hear middle voices that aren’t always easy to hear in my own playing.  Sort of demonstrates possibilities that may or may not inform performance.