Disklavier

I'm going to play the role of Quality Police a little here...

If you're getting these postings, you probably have one of Yamaha's 
incredible Disklavier or Disklavier Pro instruments.  The challenge 
is finding source MIDI files that are up to the quality of Yamaha's 
wonderful hardware.

Dan O'Connor posted this interesting link this morning:
  http://members.aol.com/prebigbang/gold.htm
Wow (yuck)!  When you look internally at those files, the quietest 
note is struck at a velocity of 93 (out of 127).  Quite Loud, with 
little dynamic range!  All the note releases are set to the nonsense 
value of 64 (i.e., the sequencer didn't know what to do).  This isn't 
how people play the piano.

A good place to go for high-quality Disklavier piano performances is 
to the piano-e-competition site.  In 2004, Vera Oussetskaia played 
the first 14 Goldberg Variations in Los Angeles at her screening 
round:
http://www.piano-e-
competition.com/contestantbios04/veraoussetskaia.htm

Unfortunately for us Disklavier Pro owners, for all the screening-
round contestants (but not the finals in Minneapolis), the XP Mode 
(HD) MIDI files got touched by sequencer software that didn't know 
about XP Mode -- and all the NoteOff (release) velocities were set to 
0 (instead of something in the range of 0 to 1023).  So, even if 
downloading from the piano-e-competition site (for the screening 
round only), you don't get what was actually recorded off the piano.

I have posted Vera's original performance in the Classical/Files 
section of this Disklavier forum (file ousset03z.mid).  It's in all 
its Disklavier Pro glory, so it should play wonderfully on all Mark 
III and IV Disklaviers.  Regular MIDI and ESEQ files are on the Web 
page I've cited.

- John Q.
Zenph Studios