Chocolate Audio Model 80 Electric Grand Piano For Kontakt

Fast forward to the past

Sampled from a Yamaha CP80 compact electric grand, the Model 80 is a work of love and an homage to the sound that defined an era.

Restoration

The electric piano was properly restored and tuned before being sampled. Special care was taken in recreating the characteristic edgy sound of the middle registers, the shallow tone of the lows and the stingy highs.

Details, details, details

Achieving a quality level on par with our goals from this piano was tough. The onboard electronics are very noisy and the piano picks up a lot of ambient noise even if it’s electric (imagine a guitar with 88 strings and a pick-up for each single string!). Through attention and care, both in restoring, preparing, tuning and sampling this amazing piece of technical excellence, we managed to capture what we believe is the best rendition of this classic compact electric grand piano.

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

The onboard effects don't require a degree in audio-engineering to make the best out of them. This is our job. Just select one of the 23 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 presets with a simple Amount knob to rule it to your taste. Add to this 101 IR custom Reverbs, sampled especially for our products.

Key Level Trimming

Version 1.5 added MIDI key-based level trimming: this feature allows you to further customize the dynamic response of the piano based on your keyboard action and listening environment

DISCLAIMERS:
- this Instrument requires the FULL RETAIL VERSION OF KONTAKT 5.5.2 or better, the free Kontakt Player will run this Instrument only in demo mode for a few minutes.
- this Instrument may be acquired only in downloadable format, download size is about 2.2 Gigabytes, so expect longer download times on slower connections

Features

2.26 GB (lossless compressed) library size, 1933 samples
12 sustaining dynamic layers, chromatically sampled
9 release trails layers, chromatically sampled
independently controllable sustain-pedal resonances
key-release noise for added authenticity
sustain-pedal down and up noise layers
a top-notch rendition of the Yamaha CP80 compact electric grand piano
sampled direct from the output to a Millennia preamp and Apogee converter
all of the details of the piano recreated through the use of our custom advanced scripting
recorded at 24 bit / 96 KHz, released at 24 bit / 44.1 KHz
dry recordings allows for maximum flexibility and sound design, either using Kontakt's own effect or your choice of third party plug-ins

Kontakt engine features

custom User Interface
velocity curve management
piano tone control, makes the sound softer or harder under your fingers
custom touch response control: set at minimum you'll get the full sound of the piano with added latency (good for mixing), at higher levels cuts more and more into the piano pre-attack portion allowing for very low perceived latency when needed (good for tracking and live playing)
modeling of the original tremolo wave shape and depth
three-band EQ inspired by the original
many under the hood techniques to make the piano true to the original (life-like re-pedaling, release trails attenuation, intelligent attenuation of each single dynamic layer for maximum dynamic response...)
master realism control and specific control over release trails, key off, resonances and pedal noise levels
envelope controls
full effects section with preset compressor, distortion, amplifier, chorus/phaser/flanger, delay and IR reverb
101 custom, high quality IR reverbs
22 compressor + tape presets
23 factory presets + user-savable presets
works as stand-alone, AAX, RTAS, AU and VST for Mac and PC