Native Instruments Akoustik Piano

Native Instruments have done what I consider to be one of the best jobs of capturing these stunning grand's with absolute precision. These are not your average everyday grand piano's either, they are the cream of the crop. I having had the privilege over the years to have played the real thing for all but one of these, I will say they picked some tough piano's to create in software. But as you'll see, they definitely have done it on a Grand scale.

Installation

I must warn you to be prepared here; this install is not for those with a lack of hard disk space. Especially if you want to install the 24 bit samples of each piano. That library will cost you about 15 gig of space. You can cut that to a little over half with the 16 bit version, which will probably work for those not wanting the ultimate in reality. It will also require a DVD ROM on your computer as the 4 disc set is on DVD, which is the only way to get the high quality samples they use. The piano is driven by the Kontakt sampling engine which runs very smooth without any glitches and keeps a clean interface for easy use by almost anyone familiar with software synths or samplers.

The installation for Native Instrument products does involve the running of a registration application. The app gathers info on the particular system you are installing it on and then sends that to Native Instruments which in turn will register you as the user and then sends a key via email to unlock the Akoustik Piano application itself. Don’t worry if your studio machine is not on the internet as they give you the option of saving the info to disk and getting it to a machine which is online. Once you have received the email, which in most instance will come within a few minutes, you simply copy the unlock key and paste it into the registration app with the paste from clipboard button in the app. As with some apps like this you will not have to worry about changing simple hardware faulting your key. It takes something major such as the mother board or CPU to trigger a re-register mode.

I must give my compliments to Native Instruments tech support here. I found myself in a very sticky situation when during the process of filling out my data to register on their website; their server had a major crash. This wasn’t a big deal at first I thought, and then after waiting a full day for my key and it wasn’t there I did what most people would do; tried to go back and register for another key. Well that is all good if you have your password to get another key. Unfortunately as a result of their server crash, that part of my information did not get transmitted to me and their registration page online wanted my password, which I did not have. Well one phone call to them, (and I did not tell them about this being for a review of their product) and a pretty short wait on hold, and I was apologized to for the inconvenience as well as having the tech take my email info after which he set my password to exactly what I wanted as well as emailing me the key instantly. He did wait on the phone as well until I had the key and installed it and verified the app started without any problems. So they are now on my list of very good tech support.

Interface and controls

I have to admit; I am a control freak and love to tweak things. And Native Instruments gives you plenty to control here, but it uses a very simple and straight forward panel. One simple page with everything you need right there. To start with it loads up with the extra controls hidden away; a simple button click and you have them down for access. First thing you will do is load your piano of choice by either selecting just the straight out piano with the icon to the left which gives you the piano with nothing tweaked. Or you can choose a piano from the drop down menu which is set up for a particular type of sound. You have 4 distinct pianos to choose from base model wise. The mighty upright work horse the Steingraeber Vintage Upright 130 with its distinct almost honkytonk type sound. Don’t be fooled though, it is very full and rich sounding. Think of Tom Waits recordings and this is the piano he would use. Next we have a piano that is unique to Akoustik Piano called the Concert Grand D. It is a unique model fusing the Kontakt sampling engine with high res samples of the Steinway model D. This one is fairly bright and plays with a very light touch. A good choice for jazz or new age type playing and sound. Almost to the top they have the Bechstein D 280 Grand. A bit thicker tonally and very smooth throughout the entire scale; it uses a duplex scale design that provides subtle harmonic overtones which give it its distinct tonal color. Think of Elton John, David Bowie, Supertramp and the Beatles to name a few. And at the top of the heap in my eyes, the mother of all grand piano's, the Bosendorfer 290 Imperial Grand. This is to me the most lush and rich sounding of all grand pianos. It can give you subtle little twinkles and in an instant turn into a thundering monster. The power this piano boasts is fantastic along with a tone that is soothing and a sound that seems to resonate forever. If you've ever listened to a Tori Amos recording's you have heard the Bosendorfer sound, very deep and dramatic. Each of these piano models has several patches which give you some preset tweaks of the given base model. My favorite is the Bosendorfer Extra Bass. A very rich and full sounding piano that sits well in even the busiest of mixes.

Enough detail there, now into the control of it all. On the right side of the main view you have 4 choices of the environment you wish to play in; concert hall, cathedral, jazz club and recording studio. They use convolution reverb which gives a much more real feel of the environment. The extra controls for the reverb are your typical controls, amount or wetness, size of the area and distance which has 4 choices, close, near, medium and far. I must give NI credit for not scrimping on the reverb, though I would mostly find myself using another reverb plug-in it is nice to have it built in for those who might not have access to the higher end reverb plug-ins. The far left of the dropdown control panel is set up with their input controls, channel for selection of the midi channel you wish it to receive on, mostly used in stand alone mode. Fine tune which defaults to 440.00 and can be stepped either with the button of more fine tuned with a double click and then your desired pitch entered numerically. Velocity curve which has 3 steps either up or down from a standard straight linear curve, a transpose knob, which does not give you any readout of exactly where you are. But if your using this as a plug-in in another app you will probably be like me and transpose right in your DAW. Tuning or Temperament. Equal is the default on most of the patches, but there are several tunings included of which I only experimented with a few, but they are there for those who wish to experiment with exotic tunings. Also in this section is a window to indicate last note played.

The next section in the controls is the Piano details section, I found this very useful for creating piano models to fit most situations. There are 6 key adjustments here. Sustain resolution and release resolution. Release reso can either be off, soft, medium or strong which pretty much covers all the ground there. Key noise which I found to be a little subtle but it worked great for adding a little reality to the sound. Pedal noise, which again is pretty subtle, but it does have its uses especially again to give a digital sample that real feel. The lid can be adjusted to 3 positions, full open, halfway or closed. This again was something I think they did a very good job on. I actually went to a Piano restorer near my home to see how accurate their interpretations were, and they are as close as they can be again in the digital world. Lastly in this section is the dynamics control. This along with the velocity curve adjustment can help make up for having a not so piano feeling controller or adjusting for playing styles which might not be exactly suited for a grand piano. Again it is a pretty simple control having the default at a medium dynamics setting and adjusting either up 3 steps or down 3 to a pretty flat dynamic feel.

Next section is the equalizer with 3 bands. It has a nice little visual screen to see exactly what you are doing to the EQ curve with adjustments for frequency, Q and gain. Again they don’t seem to have scrimped on this either as I found it worked up to par with some of my more expensive plug-in parametric.

Last window has simple control for pan and width, again these worked as expected. The width control can go a bit over board, but it gives some different effects when setting it very high.

Now as stated earlier, I have been privileged to have played on several of these models of piano and the piano used for the lid comparison was a Steinway so that sound was very easy to compare. I have looked for years to find a good rendition of the Bosendorfer piano's and the closest I had come until now was a very large memory scarfing version used by my SampleCell sampler. That one however will now rest neatly by the wayside as I can honestly say my heart was stolen by this beauty of a piano. Native Instruments has done an astounding job of getting these sampled pianos to play and feel like the real thing. I'll explain feel in a minute. The technology used is called Layer Morphing Technology, which creates a seamless transition across the velocity layers loaded for that piano. And considering that each piano loads about 3 gigs of samples for just one piano they have all the bases covered. All these samples mean that they have accounted for all the little nuances that happen when playing a piano of this type. I happen to use a high end piano weighted controller and after a while you almost feel as though you are playing a real piano. That is due to the excellent sound Native Instruments have captured and created. I would also have to say a lot of the quality has to be credited to their DFD technology as well. What that means is that with a sample set this large it is not efficient to try and load it into RAM, and who for the most part has 3 gig of RAM loaded into their computer. DFD or Direct from Disc streaming technology allows the samples to be streamed right off the hard drive as long as it is a fairly fast HD. You can even get by with as little as 512 MB of RAM and it will work efficiently with the DFD technology. I would highly recommend a set up which uses a separate audio disc to avoid choking the OS disc as this kind of technology would almost require it.

Lastly a feature for those who don’t want to open there DAW just for a quick note pad work up of a piano tune. The Akoustik Piano also works in stand alone mode aside from DXi, VSTi, Audio Units and RTAS plug-in mode. When in stand alone mode the app has its own 2 track sequencer built in for recording and playback of midi sequences.

As far as being a heavy CPU user, well it is and it isn’t. With a single Bosendorfer loaded I was getting peaking at about 20% CPU usage in Sonar 5. However, I loaded 4 instances of the Akoustik Piano into Sonar 5 and the CPU usage only jumped to a very easy to manage 33%. In Project 5 ver. 2 a single instance only generated about 13% with a single piano loaded. So I am guessing CPU usage may vary from app to app.

Pros and Cons

Pro's This is one of the best piano modules I have ever played. Its interface is easy to use and very simple to navigate. I can honestly say this will be my go to app for most piano work from now on, and a welcome addition to the studio.

Con's This really shouldn’t be counted as a con but for those without a DVD ROM in their PC it could be. The sample collection is very large, as expected and does require a DVD ROM for installation. And also requires a very large amount of disc space for the samples, so be prepared with plenty of hard disc space.