How can a little electronic keyboard sound so much like a real piano?
Today’s portable keyboard instruments are capable of creating astonishingly realistic replications of familiar but complex sounds such as a grand piano thanks to a sophisticated technology known as multisampling. In multisampling, a highly accurate digital recording, or sample, of an instrument is made for each of many different tonal ranges for instance, there might be a representative sample for each octave of a piano’s keyboard. When assigned to the corresponding keys on a portable keyboard and played back, these multiple samples produce a far more realistic representation of the tonal characteristics of the instrument across its range than would a single sample that’s pitch-shifted up or down. In the case of high-end instruments like Yamaha’s Portable Grand series, the samples are recorded in stereo, adding to the spaciousness and realism of the replicated sound.
