![]() ![]() Standing 10 feet two inches in its cotton socks, the Italian-made, top-of-the-range Fazioli grand is designed for the modern, large-capacity concert hall and has its tone enriched and amplified by the increased string-length in the bass section. The three grand pianos in True Keys are an American Steinway D, a Bechstein semi-concert grand and a Fazioli F308, with a collective price tag that would make Elton John blush. After much tweaking and testing, a version of UVI Workstation optimised for True Keys Pianos was built, and the piano package was ready for lift-off. True Keys Pianos' American Steinway D concert grand.In order to create a product that would maintain a high level of performance while conserving system resources, VI Labs ended up collaborating with the French company UVI, makers of UVI Workstation and the MOTU Mach Five sound engine. An unnamed VI Labs spokesman confided in me, "I would be lying if I said our patience wasn't tested a few times along the way.” In short, it was a programmer's nightmare. Release samples and round-robin note repetitions bumped the audio file count up to nearly 50,000, then an elaborate scripting language had to be devised to handle the numerous performance details. Three grand pianos were chromatically recorded at up to 15 dynamic levels, from three mic positions, in normal, sustain pedal, soft pedal and half-pedalled playing modes (more of which later). No half-decent sample library gets knocked up overnight, and since VI Labs' aim was to raise the technical standard of virtual pianos, it took nearly four years to develop the final product. The ensuing collaboration with person or persons unknown resulted in the creation of VI Labs and the True Keys piano collection. The company's details are shrouded in mystery, but this much is known: back in 2009, one of its principals, a demanding power user of sampled instruments, developed a profound distaste for the sampled pianos then on the market and decided, in time-honoured fashion, that he could create a better one himself. Perhaps we've reached a point where even nit-picking sceptics like myself must accept that JS Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier has been superseded by the Well-Sampled Pianoforte?Īnyway, the latest high-end piano collection to come to the attention of your Bad-Tempered Reviewer is US company VI Labs' True Keys Pianos, currently winning accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Sample companies have begun throwing resources into capturing all the dynamic variations and pedal inflections of some top-notch 88-note concert grands, and (as with orchestral samples) the gap between the real thing and the sampled facsimiles has narrowed to a point where very few people can tell the difference. I used to dislike playing sampled pianos almost as much as I hate going to the dentist, but in recent years something has changed. A second 'multi' page (featuring eight-band parametric EQ and a full range of effects) allows the creation of multitimbral user setups. True Keys Pianos' UVI Workstation GUI contains a four-channel mixer for its three microphone positions and 'mix' samples, an elaborate array of pedal controls, and convolution reverb settings. Three grand pianos jostle for supremacy in VI Labs' deep-sampled, secrecy-shrouded True Keys Pianos package. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |