#PIANOTEQ 7 REVIEW PRO#
#PIANOTEQ 7 REVIEW FREE#

One of my favorite Kontakt pianos is the Una Corda felt instrument that Native Instruments designed with Nils Frahm. I was also surprised that I ended up liking the sound of the Model B pack slightly more, as it was a bit lighter and warmer. This added another level of realism and excitement to performing with Pianoteq. The Condition slider on the bottom of the GUI allows you to go from Mint to Worn, and I love the slight tuning inconsistencies introduced by moving towards the Worn side. The sound quality was astonishing, and with my Westone IEM’s in, I felt like I was in a room with that piano. Having grown up on a Steinway 1098 and generally gravitating towards Model D’s in recording studios, I was very excited to play the Pianoteq 6 Model D pack. The standalone version of Pianoteq also comes with a MIDI Archiver, so that if you are playing and come up with a cool idea for a song, but forgot to record it, you can retrieve a retroactive MIDI recording of the performance to import into your DAW of choice.Ī closer look at Pianoteq 6’s GUI reveals the deep levels of customization available in this unique, physically-modeled virtual instrument. The ability to calibrate keyboard response in Pianoteq is also a very nice touch, and you can even save velocity response presets for each of your keyboards so that they interact naturally with the software. I found that I love adjusting the Unison Width (the detuning of each of the three strings per note) to add a natural chorus/out-of-tune piano sound, which I find is effective in mimicking the player piano sounds used by Ramin Djawadi for the music of Westworld.

Further parameters available include Octave Stretching (slightly sharpening the higher octaves and flattening the lower ones), Hammer Hardness, String Length, and Sympathetic Resonance. The effects include Tremolo, Wah, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Fuzz, Delay, Amp, Compressor, and a Mini-EQ. Each of these editable sections can give some character to whichever piano you are working with. In the main window of the GUI, you can adjust Tuning, Action, Mallet Bounce, EQ and Effects. In order to cover all available features in Pianoteq, MODARTT has provided me with the Studio bundle, though it’s easy to enjoy Pianoteq’s lower-tier versions just the same. This would be my recommendation for those just getting started with Pianoteq.

#PIANOTEQ 7 REVIEW PRO#

Most users might find they don’t need all the fancy options the Pro and Studio versions have to offer, which makes the Stage version seems like great value. Pro adds per-note editing and support for up to 192kHz audio, and the most expensive Studio version gives you access to all of the 49 sound packs. The cheapest version, Stage, won’t allow you to edit the piano model or microphone settings, but the Standard version adds these features.

So what’s the difference between each version of Pianoteq? The capability to tweak.

#PIANOTEQ 7 REVIEW FREE#

Each version comes with 14 free instruments, including grand pianos, a cimbalom, harpsichords, and church bells. Today, we are going to test Pianoteq 6 and see if it can stand out in a very saturated market of virtual piano plugins.īefore we get into all the features offered in Pianoteq, I want to take a second to highlight the 4 different versions of the software. The lack of samples in these physically-modeled instruments means that all of Pianoteq 6 will only take up about 50MB of space! That’s a lot smaller than many of the leading virtual pianos available, for example, the 3.6GB Native Instruments Grandeur Piano, as well as most Kontakt pianos. This means that the sound of the plugin is computed via a detailed physical model involving the hammers, the strings, and the soundboard. Or maybe it’s a big, multi-sampled instrument file that can be quite taxing on your computer’s resources.Įnter Pianoteq 6by MODARTT, one of the most popular piano VST/AU plugins that is based around physical modeling rather than traditional sampling. Still, that free already-included piano might not fit your aesthetic. If you’re a producer, it is very likely that you have at least one piano plugin-even if you never intended to, as so many DAWs offer a sampled grand piano as part of the package. One of the most common instruments in popular music-from Bach to Adele, or Bill Evans to Billy Joel-has been the piano. With Pianoteq 6, MODARTT opts out of the massive sample library and instead relies on physical modeling, utilizing only 50MB of space-does it stack up?

Pianoteq 7 review