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Chocolate Audio O.D.D. Grand Piano For Kontakt

Chocolate Audio O.D.D. Grand Piano For Kontakt

Already having four pianos in our product line, two of which are very sought-after top-notch models, made the choice for a new piano difficult at first, but very rewarding in the end in our humble opinion.

What we find sometimes, in sampled pianos, is a lack of personality as to try to fulfil the dream of the perfect piano. As any accomplished piano player knows, though, such a piano might only exist for a single player, not for the world-wide community of piano players. So, among other ventures we are developing, we decided to do an odd, peculiar piano.

We deliberately chose to sample the piano with full detail (11 dynamic levels) but stop before the "ff" dynamic, to have a piano with a warm and intimate sound.
We chose a very good sounding Yamaha C6.
We chose and carefully placed no less than 29 microphones around the piano in order to achieve many different sound signatures.
We chose one of the best studios in Italy, Art&Music Studios.
We chose microphones which do not represent common choices for recording "perfect pianos", but mics we found were complementing the sound we had in our minds and hearts.
We compiled and edited the whole thing as a set of 3 soulful and colorful instruments.

Three (or more) Pianos in One

O.D.D Gran Piano is made up of 3 Kontakt NKI Instrument files.

Oneiric Piano

An open, wide piano sound, with lots of roomy combinations.

1. 2 x AKG C414B-TLII wide open on the player side of the piano

2. A Wunder Audio CM7 FET on the opposite side, capturing a darker and more intimate tone

3. 2 x vintage AKG C460-CK1 as room mics, placed far away and very low

4. 2 x vintage AKG C451E-CK22 as an additional room, omni microphones, very tall

Dark Piano

A ribbon-mic based combination, bringing a lot of personality and some precious darkness with an edge.

1. 2 x AEA N22 matched pair in AB configuration on the listener side

2. 2 x Earthworks SR77 matched pair on the end tail of the piano

3. A single vintage Beyerdynamic M88N(C) capturing the bassy tone of the holes

4. 2 x AEA N8 matched pair in Blumlein configuration up high and 2.5 meters away on the listener side

Dreamy Piano

Based on dynamic mics and the odd end of the piano (its bottom side) creates an edgy and wide sound palette.

1. 2 x vintage, cheap but amazingly good AKG D190E on the player side in a wide AB

2. A single AKG C414B-ULS placed on the floor underneath the piano body

3. 2 x Crown PZM30D placed between the legs and the harmonic board, one next to the low strings, the other next to the higher registers

4. A single vintage dynamic omni Sennheiser MD211 on the ground as room mic

Sound a-la-carte

One might think that having 3 NKI Instruments, each featuring four different choices and combinations of mics plus the reverb would make finding the perfect balance impossible.

It is not.

These Instruments, we believe, easily open 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:

Tuning your sound

- Volume, does what it's supposed to do
- Pan, 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

Change of soul

Just by dialing different settings on these 3 knobs it's easy to change the piano and adapt its response, sound and tone to better fit the composition and/or your playing style.

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 71 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.

Custom IR Reverbs you can use (Really!!!)

The Reverb section, so critical for acoustic pianos in particular, features an 100% in-house developed collection of 101 carefully selected high quality Impulse Responses coming from both real spaces and revered vintage and contemporary studio hardware.

Key Level Trimming

Added with Version 1.5, MIDI key-based level trimming allows you to further customize the dynamic response of the piano based on your keyboard action, taste 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 21 Gigabyte, so expect longer download times on slower connections

Features

20.56 GB (lossless compressed) library size, 20496 samples
3 NKI Instrument Files, each representing a different take on the same piano, the result of different odd mic techniques being put to good use
3 sets of 4 microphones
Oneiric Piano: AKG C414B-TLII, Wunder Audio CM7 FET, AKG C460-CK1, AKG C451E-CK22
Dark Piano: AEA N22, Earthworks SR77, Beyerdynamic M88N(C), AEA N8
Dreamy Piano: AKG D190E, AKG C414B-ULS, Crown PZM30D, Sennheiser MD211
11 sustaining dynamic layers, chromatically sampled
8 release trails layers, chromatically sampled
independently controllable sustain-pedal resonances
key-release noise for added authenticity
sustain-pedal down and up noise layers
sampled with Millennia, Neve, Heritage Audio, CAPI, SSL and Focusrite preamps through an SSL Duality 48 analog mixing console
all of the details of the piano recreated through the use of our custom advanced scripting
released at 24 bit / 44.1 KHz
easy-to-use mixer for extreme sound-mangling

Kontakt engine features

custom User Interface
velocity curve management
piano tone control, makes the piano 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)
fine-tuned three-band EQ for each channel
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
101 custom, high quality IR reverbs (not the usual IR reverbs you find on other Kontakt libs)
22 (+ 22) compressor + tape presets
71 (24 + 25 + 22) factory presets + user-savable presets
works as stand-alone, AAX, RTAS, AU and VST for Mac and PC