I find Pianoteq’s modeled pianos quite convincing, personally, especially if you tweak the per string tuning so it’s not robotically in tune. Even some sampled pianos are just so incredibly well tuned they lose a bit of the ‘life’ that an actual piano gives you. Let’s be honest… after a world class piano technician has tuned a grand piano to be as technically ‘perfect’ as possible, you get maybe 30 minutes of spirited playing on it and then it always drifted out of perfect tune!

And that’s what you tend to hear on pop and jazz recordings. An ALMOST in tune piano!

If you can tweak the per string (not per note) tuning on a modeled piano, it starts to sound WAY more ‘real’. By the way, if sampled pianos are good enough, I’m a big fan of Keyscapes, simply because, for the money, you not only get a great piano, you get almost every other electro-mechanical keyboard as well! Killer Rhodes’s, Clav’s, Wurli’s, toy pianos, harpsichords, organs, you name it. Pricey but then divide the cost by the number of GREAT keyboards you get, and it becomes a real bargain…