High Quality Piano for Logic?

If you have Logic then these pianos work well in EXS24 (especially with 2Gb RAM) and are very cheap for what they are:

http://www.sampletekk.com/proddetail.php?prod=PMIDELIVER-002-FORMAT

http://www.sampletekk.com/proddetail.php?prod=PMIDELIVER-004-FORMAT

And yes, an external 7200 rpm drive will be essential.



Intel Mini 1.66, PPC G4 450MP. Logic Pro 7.2.3. Mac OS X (10.4.9) RME FF400/ Hammerfall Multiface. Apple Certified Logic Pro Trainer.

Have a look at pianoteq. It works completely without samples - of course it's a matter of taste. It has no natural room reverb as samples do, you have to add reverb by the internal reverb unit or better an external effect plugin, but I like its velocity and control facilities. You can download a demo version with some muted notes, but sufficient for an in-depth impression.

All suggestions so far are excellent, do look into them.

Another often looked option, that IMO, is still the best sounding acoustic sample available, is Art Vista's Virtual Grand.

http://www.artvista.net/VirtualGrandPiano.html

It's a wonderfully sampled Steinway, and was sampled with the mics a bit further away, so it doesn't suffer from the "plunkiness" of some of the close mic'd samples. You really can hear the wood "cavity" in these samples, and the mid register, which is arguably the hardest to faithfully capture, doesn't suffer from the synthetic sound that many can't seem to over come.

Best of all, is the price.

I don't know about the one's posted above, but I have Akoustik Piano, and I love it, I especially enjoy the grand piano, very organic and rich sounding.

For me the Sampletekk Seven Seas Grand (listen to my "Eleanor Rigby" demo) and the ArtVista Virtual Grand are excellent affordable choices. ArtVista's Maljmso is also great for moody stuff.

I have to say however that based on what I heard at NAMM the Garritan Steinway will be the best one yet when it is released.

I had the same question. In the end I went with pianoteq, because of its fexibility and the quality of the end result. It is only 15MB BTW!!

Graham

I just bought PMI's Old Lady a couple of weeks ago from Sampletekk, at the current prices ($50) these pianos are beautiful and so cheap it's rude not to. They do other pianos too at a range of prices, but since Sampletekk bought out PMI their sample sets are outrageously cheap, and Old Lady and Emporer are recommended.

Also the Art Vista's Malmsjo is beautiful as well...

My favourites so far are Sampletekk's Black Grand, White Grand, and I've been getting some killer sounds with the 7CJr Grand (which is very soft and classical in the library) and heavy compression, so that it punches (if you're looking for that) and, at the same time sits in a heavy mix very well. I liked the effect so much I had to save the channel strip settings and now find myself using it all time even for material I may not have considered such a thing before.

If you wanna feel the wood and the depth of a piano, go for Art Vista Grand Piano.

If you just need to have some piano parts in a pop/rock/modern mix, you can also try Pianoteq since it won't take hard disk space (but it needs a good cpu anyway).

Yo Paul, There's been lots of discussion on sampled pianos on this forum. Some interesting comments re: Ivory and noise. Check it out Dawg. I have a Yamaha S90ES board which has some nice piano sounds, but compared to Ivory and Akoustic, the Yammie can't compare. Ivory sounds fine on quiet playing but if you lay into on some gospel or funk, it just seems to get honky. I tried all the tweaking to no avail. Then picked up Akoustic and it's my go to piano most times these days. Not wanting to knock Ivory it can be pretty darn sweet if used in the right context. Listened to the pianoteq demos and they didn't do much for me. Regards

I Use NI Akoustik Piano mostly, but the Pianos that come with NI Kontakt 2 are quite passable

As a pianist myself, I continue to reaffirm the Sampletekk White, Black and 7CJr products. I do think they need tweaking on the release layers but that's nothing a little EXS24 patch editing can't do.

I've never found or heard a modeled piano sound as good as a sample ones (there's always something a little to pristing about them, even when they're trying to inject natural randomness), except for TruePianos but they're very late in getting their AU version out, and I don't think they're suitable for everything.

I'm also a Sampletekk fan, but I just wondered what sort of tweaking you get up to yoink? I'm usually a 'happy if they sound good, and not happy if they don't' type, but if you have any tips for improvement to share that'd be great!
Personally the ONLY reason I can see for using Pianoteq is the fact that it won't use much memory. It tried the demo a while back and had to wonder what the fuss was about. Doesn't sound like a piano to me I'm afraid.

G5 Quad 6.5Gb, Logic 7.2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.8) PB 1.25Ghz, MBP 2.33Ghz

Hello_
I have Akoustik Piano and I don't think there is anything better for true piano
sound. I've listened to all the other mp3 demo's and they don't come close. There is one drawback. If you don't have a powerful system it will bring you machine to it's knees. I had to bump my buffer to 512 just to get one instance
and then convert to it audio to add another track. So beware.

Like I was saying earlier, typically I find the crossfades between a lot of the release layers are more evident than I'd like, especially when releasing while the sustain pedal is engaged.

Additionally I've never picked up a piano that perfectly fit my playing style out of the box, so tweaking velocity curves and action, as well as initial attack and decay is something I've always fiddled with until it matches (as closely as possible) me sitting behind a real Steinway or Yamaha (or Bosendorfer) grand.

I should add that most of the tweaks are never extreme just lots of minute little ones which add up to increased playability for me.