FANTASTiC 24 April 2016 | 7.33 GB

The Model D grand piano was sampled from a

Hamburg-made 1939 Steinway D274

grand coda piano. This particular piano has been in use in various venues in Italy and has been

played and praised

by many top-level international classical and jazz players. This piano's age definitely guarantees it the

vintage

moniker, nonetheless it went through

proper maintenance and restoration

over the years by highly-skilled italian technicians. It totally resonates with all of the great music played through it. We sampled this piece of history in a medium-size hall surrounded by a plethora of microphones.

Macro-phones

We didn't settle for a single pair or a limited selection of microphones from the start, we wanted to make sure that the piano, after the sampling and editing process had the best chances to

preserve its soul

, something which can be hard to achieve. For this very reason, we used many more microphones than the ones we ended up with.

Choice of Microphones

These are the Mics we carefully selected after multiple playing and listening sessions on the edited samples:

a

Schoeps CMC6 with MK4

cardiod capsules matched-pair placed at the player's position

a

Neumann KM184

matched-pair placed right on the edge of the open-lid with a listener's perspective

a single

AKG C12

tube mic picking up the sound from the lid, listener's position

a pair of matched

Neumann M149

mics to pick up the sound from a medium distanceThese microphones, by themselves or combined, give you the

widest possible gamut of tonal colors

you might need from a top-notch concert piano. To preserve tonal balance, we even carefully

phase-aligned

all of the microphones.

Mixing a-la-carte

One might think that having four different choices and combinations of mics plus the reverb would make finding the perfect balance impossible.

It is not.

This Instrument, we believe, easily opens up many different sonic worlds by using its on-board mixer. This tool is focused on easy-to-get results with a few tailored controls:

Volume

Panpot

, places the sound in a specific direction

Mute

and

Solo

Width

, controls the width of the stereo signals

Reverb Send

, amount of signal for each microphone that gets processed by the on-board IR Reverb

Master effects are a

3-band EQ

with cherry-picked frequency centers, a

Preset Compressor & Tape Emulation

and the

IR Reverb

On each single channel you might use a simple but very effective

3-band EQ

Optimal resources management

Dealing with a piano Instrument featuring

four microphones

at the same time can bring an

heavy load on system resources

. The amount of playback voices for the CPU and Disk Streaming, preload in RAM and load times could suffer.

A click on

Purge Muted

simply removes from memory all muted channels, not anymore weighing on RAM, CPU and streaming resources.

Simplicity, with depth

Our approach to sampled Instruments is to let the musician in you fly free of any technical burden.

Fast, full satisfaction is guaranteed

: you just need to play, the fastest possible learning-curve is always kept as a reference when designing our Instruments. At the same time, when there's that techie-need to

tweak and fine-tune

, our multi-layer user interfaces allow for it, giving you

the best of both worlds.

Advanced sampling and scripting

We believe the real break-through in these ages is creating

advanced, high-quality Instruments

which don't require you to earn a master in computer programming before you

start making music

with them. Making matters easy for the musician always means introducing more and more layers of complication for us developers. First of all we are musicians, and we don't want you to end up putting our products on a virtual shelf and forget about them because they are too hard to learn and use.

Preset-galore

Our effects section doesn't require a degree in audio-engineering to make the best out of it.

This is our job.

Just select one of the

34 main Presets

and fine tune it using a few carefully selected parameters.

The

Compressor & Tape Emulation

section, usually hard to grasp for the inexpert in audio tweaking feature no less than

22 + 22

(for when using a single Mic only, marked with a + sign) presets with a simple

Amount

knob to rule it to your taste.

The

Reverb

section, so critical for acoustic pianos in particular, features an in-house developed collection of

17 carefully selected high quality Impulse Responses

coming from both real spaces and revered vintage and contemporary studio hardware.