NEW - Version 2.0 of The 88 Series Pianos engine is out

V. 2 represents a new version of our engine. Here are the changes since v. 1.0 (include v. 1.5 too):

BUG-FIXING

NEW FEATURES

IMPROVEMENTS

Upright... done right

When we chose to create piano Instruments, we carefully chose which upright piano to start from. When facing grand codas, the choice is rather limited, but upright pianos are a totally different world. We wanted a piano capable of producing both a full sound and the shallow on the edge of being out-of-tune tone characteristic of so many historical recordings. We sampled a beautifully made italian upright piano built by Steinbach in Torino and placed it in a mid-size roomy studio 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:

These microphones, by themselves or combined, give you the widest possible gamut of tonal colors you might imagine in an upright 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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 + 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 101 carefully selected high quality Impulse Responses coming from both real spaces and revered vintage and contemporary studio hardware.

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