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The Ultimate Piano Collection from EASTWEST contains four of the best Pianos ever built: Steinway D, Steinway C, Fazioli F228, and Bцsendorfer 225. Every key has been sampled in various attacks, with and without sustain pedal. The result is one of the best Piano CD-ROMs available. You get $260,000 worth of pianos ready to play on a silver disk. There are 13 different kinds of piano sounds each with its own samples and characteristics. These pianos start sounding real good with 24 Mb or more of RAM (16Mb minimum is required). THE ULTIMATE PIANO COLLECTION (SOUND ON SOUND REVIEW of the Akai version) If you've ever tried to create your own authentic piano multi-sample, you'll appreciate just how hard it is. Like many acoustic instruments, the depth of emotion and expression that can be coaxed from a piano leads many to believe that recreating it with samples would be virtually impossible. With so many different potential sounds in the piano (classical, rock 'n' roll, jazz, and blues etc) the only way to cover all eventualities would be to sample a number of different pianos at almost every note, in almost every conceivable style of playing - and that is almost exactly what the producers of this release have done. This unique CD-ROM brings together the highest quality, stereo multi-samples of the four greatest pianos in the world, namely the Steinway D, Steinway C, Fazioli F228 and the Boesendorfer 225. Each piano is sampled under a number of different playing conditions (marcato, with sustain pedal, loud and soft, etc) and is presented in its own individual Akai programme. There are no fancy effects, no riffs, chords or licks to sample, just true stereo and mono multi samples of these four classic instruments. It is the character and sound of the four different pianos that really shines through with all of these recordings. The Bosendorfer has a shorter decay and crisp attack, whereas the Steinways are much more 'classic' sounding instruments. The Fazioli has a lot of sonic depth, and to buy, is actually more expensive than a Steinway, as it utilizes much more modern construction techniques. As you might imagine, this kind of sampling power has a flagrant disregard for memory space. Most of the various programmes contained here are presented in 32, 24, 16, 12, 10 and occasionally 6Mb formats. Obviously, the more memory you can use, the higher the overall sound quality will be. There is a good selection of mono alternatives for anyone working to a 'memory budget', and plenty of options for loading in only certain ranges and styles, to conserve sample space. But memory preservation is not really the order of the day here. Indeed, the Steinway D and Fazioli programmes give you the chance to load both soft and loud partitions separately (into 2 samplers for instance), giving you a SIMM-numbing 64Mb, velocity-switching, stereo multi-sampled piano to play with! In practice, these sounds work like a dream. Depending on what kind of piano sound you are looking for, there will almost certainly be something here that you can use. Where the piano sustains have been looped, it has been done with jaw-dropping realism, using the programming parameters of the Akai platform to great effect. The sound clarity is sharp yet warm, and if you close your eyes whilst playing, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were tickling the ivories of the real thing. This is undoubtedly a true professional's product, and General MIDI fans with 1.5Mb of memory to spare should steer well clear. If it were it a car, it would be a gas-guzzling V8. Forget about saving memory, and resign yourself to the fact that whilst RAM upgrades aren't exactly cheap, at least they're cheaper (and more portable) than the pianos themselves. The Ultimate Piano Collection is, in my experience, is as close to the real thing as technology will currently allow. Load up and enjoy.
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