[ Ссылка ]
A pristinely maintained Yamaha C7 chosen by such greats as Michel Petrucciani and Chick Corea.
Top Model
The Model 7 grand piano was sampled from a Yamaha C7 grand coda piano. Our first idea was to sample a CFIII, but when we went to the rental-house we totally fell in love with this one and chose it. This particular piano has been in constant use since the 80s in two highly praised concert halls in Torino (Italy) and has been played by artists like Michel Petrucciani and Chick Corea along the years. This piano is under constant maintenance by highly-skilled Italian technicians. We sampled this little-big monster of a piano in a medium-size hall surrounded by a smorgasbord of microphones.
Macro-phones
From the start, we wanted to make sure that after the sampling and editing process the piano had the best chance of preserving its soul, something which can be very hard to achieve. For this reason, we set up many more microphones than the ones we ended up choosing to allow us to find the most musical combination. After multiple playing and listening sessions on the edited samples, we finally settled on the following mics:
A matched pair of Schoeps CMC6 with MK4 cardiod capsules placed at the player position, a matched pair of Royer 121 placed inside the open-lid but at a healthy distance from the soundboard to pick up both the direct sound and the reflections from the lid thanks to their figure-8 patterns, a matched pair of modded Oktava MK-012 spaced, placed right above the strings and a matched pair of Neumann M149 mics to pick up the sound from a medium distance.
These microphones, by themselves or combined, give you the widest possible gamut of tonal colors you might need from a top-notch concert piano. To preserve tonal balance, we also carefully phase-aligned all of the microphones.
Mixing a-la-carte
This Instrument easily opens up many different sonic worlds by tweaking its on-board mixer. This tool is focused on easy-to-get results with a few tailored controls: Volume, Panpot, Mute and Solo, Sereo Width, a simple but very effective 3-band EQ, and Reverb Send for each pair of mics.
To top it off, there is a Master 3-band EQ with specifically chosen frequency centers, a Compressor & a Tape Emulator at the end of the chain.
Preset-galore
An effects section shouldn't require a degree in audio-engineering to make the best out of it. This is our job. Just select one of the 34 main Presets and fine tune it using a few carefully selected parameters.
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.
