A Dream Come True: A Concert Grand of Your Very
Own
If you make computer-assisted music and want the lush tone of a genuine concert grand, look no further - The Grand 2 is your first choice. The good news is that it sounds exactly like a world-class, handmade, perfectly intonated grand piano, the finest instrument money can buy. Better yet, it is affordable, easy to tote, fits in every apartment, and can be made part of every production without the technical skills and resources required to record the real thing. Painstakingly sampled in an anechoic room, the source material for The Grand comes courtesy of two of the world’s finest, rarest and surely most expensive concert pianos. Unlike a digital piano or a sampler, The Grand is not powered by looped samples, and it delivers natural full-length sustain and decay. For even greater authenticity, every key was sampled at many different velocities, faithfully capturing the full extent of every note’s decay. The result is a jaw-dropping VST instrument with mind-boggling dynamic response. Not only does it sound like a bona fide concert grand, it feels just like the real deal when you play.
Truly Natural Feel
The Grand is a lively, responsive instrument, highly sensitive to your touch and playing style. Featuring freely definable velocity curves and attack sensitivity, The Grand adapts to suit your keyboard and playing style. Aside from the keys, a pianist’s most important means of expression are the pedals. The Grand’s respond just like their counterparts on a real concert grand, and faithfully carry out every sustain and sustenuto pedal command.
Unrivalled Realism
The Grand 2 offers a variety of functions emulating acoustic grand pianos’ trademark response and adding distinctive incidental noises for an even more realistic grand piano sound. You can adjust these acoustical properties’ volume independently. You may even deactivate these functions if you wish, say to make The Grand sound like a digital piano.
New Features in The Grand 2
A Second Concert Grand
The Grand 2 features a second grand piano that adds a sonically rich option. The perfect complement to the original model, it was sampled, edited and processed with even greater painstaking effort. And this awesome quality makes is so much more than merely an encore. Though The Grand was everything players had been hoping for, the new model offers precisely the lush tonal alternative many had been dreaming of. You’re sure to find the perfect piano sound for your song in these two models.
New Playing Sounds
To put an even more faithful replication of a grand piano at your fingertips, The Grand now also offers incidental playing sounds such as key clicks and pedal noise – which you can add and subtract as desired.
Surround Hall
The integrated Ambience Hall now also offers four-channel support and lets you place the grand piano at any position in the virtual room.
RAMSave™
With the benefit of RAMSaveTM, a process Steinberg had premiered in the software sampler HALion 3, you can make very efficient use of the host computer’s RAM. When RAMSaveTM is enabled, superfluous samples are automatically dumped from the main memory. That way, more RAM is available for other tasks and projects are loaded and saved so much faster. RAMSaveTM automatically scans the MIDI notes allocated to The Grand, dumping all unassigned samples from the RAM.
Enhanced Performance
The Grand 2 sports a fresh, new Audio Engine. Overhauled from the bottom up, it considerably enhances performance, particularly for disk streaming. The new Eco mode also helps lighten the computer’s load, which comes in especially handy when you’re composing.
Compatibility
The Grand 2 supports the prevailing plug-in formats VST, DXi and AU. It also integrates into Pro Tools®, courtesy of ReWire support. And with the standalone version, you can even use The Grand 2 without a host application.
The Verdict
For those of us who have tried, you'll know it's a difficult thing to record a grand piano. The first thing you need, of course, is to find such an instrument, in tune, and set about the task of setting up microphones - easier said than done, so it was clear that when Steinberg introduced The Grand in it's original guise it would be received with interest. This version, The Grand 2, is actually two expensive sampled grand pianos, together with the noise of the hammers, (particularly pleasing at the higher end of the keyboard) and offers us variations as to tonal quality - natural, soft, bright or hard - with different levels of ambience and reverb, as would be appropriate for different venues, and pedal control. As you would expect, this takes up a fair amount of hard drive space, something approaching 4Gb, and is fairly RAM intensive, although there are ways within the programme to ease this situation a bit if your computer is not quite what it could be. It needs a copy protection key - a dongle - to enable it to work and this is not supplied. If you already have a Steinberg dongle such as for Cubase, then transfer the licence to this; otherwise you'll need to buy one on top of the cost of the programme (but when one considers the cost of a grand piano it puts things in perspective).
The instrument can be used in stand-alone mode, or as a plug-in - VST, DXi, AU....it's very flexible, and is cross-platform, so works with Mac or PC.
So how does it sound? Like a grand piano. Excellent. We didn't feel that as pianists here at Software Editorial that we could do it justice, so a friendly professional pianist helped us out. We were taken from Beethoven to Scott Joplin and back to Schubert; the only criticism was regarding the keyboard - as you would expect, to get the best from this software a weighted full size keyboard would be preferable. So to sum up - if you need a "real" piano for your compositions, or indeed for live performances with a laptop, then The Grand 2 would be an excellent choice.
If you make computer-assisted music and want the lush tone of a genuine concert grand, look no further - The Grand 2 is your first choice. The good news is that it sounds exactly like a world-class, handmade, perfectly intonated grand piano, the finest instrument money can buy. Better yet, it is affordable, easy to tote, fits in every apartment, and can be made part of every production without the technical skills and resources required to record the real thing. Painstakingly sampled in an anechoic room, the source material for The Grand comes courtesy of two of the world’s finest, rarest and surely most expensive concert pianos. Unlike a digital piano or a sampler, The Grand is not powered by looped samples, and it delivers natural full-length sustain and decay. For even greater authenticity, every key was sampled at many different velocities, faithfully capturing the full extent of every note’s decay. The result is a jaw-dropping VST instrument with mind-boggling dynamic response. Not only does it sound like a bona fide concert grand, it feels just like the real deal when you play.
Truly Natural Feel
The Grand is a lively, responsive instrument, highly sensitive to your touch and playing style. Featuring freely definable velocity curves and attack sensitivity, The Grand adapts to suit your keyboard and playing style. Aside from the keys, a pianist’s most important means of expression are the pedals. The Grand’s respond just like their counterparts on a real concert grand, and faithfully carry out every sustain and sustenuto pedal command.
Unrivalled Realism
The Grand 2 offers a variety of functions emulating acoustic grand pianos’ trademark response and adding distinctive incidental noises for an even more realistic grand piano sound. You can adjust these acoustical properties’ volume independently. You may even deactivate these functions if you wish, say to make The Grand sound like a digital piano.
New Features in The Grand 2
A Second Concert Grand
The Grand 2 features a second grand piano that adds a sonically rich option. The perfect complement to the original model, it was sampled, edited and processed with even greater painstaking effort. And this awesome quality makes is so much more than merely an encore. Though The Grand was everything players had been hoping for, the new model offers precisely the lush tonal alternative many had been dreaming of. You’re sure to find the perfect piano sound for your song in these two models.
New Playing Sounds
To put an even more faithful replication of a grand piano at your fingertips, The Grand now also offers incidental playing sounds such as key clicks and pedal noise – which you can add and subtract as desired.
Surround Hall
The integrated Ambience Hall now also offers four-channel support and lets you place the grand piano at any position in the virtual room.
RAMSave™
With the benefit of RAMSaveTM, a process Steinberg had premiered in the software sampler HALion 3, you can make very efficient use of the host computer’s RAM. When RAMSaveTM is enabled, superfluous samples are automatically dumped from the main memory. That way, more RAM is available for other tasks and projects are loaded and saved so much faster. RAMSaveTM automatically scans the MIDI notes allocated to The Grand, dumping all unassigned samples from the RAM.
Enhanced Performance
The Grand 2 sports a fresh, new Audio Engine. Overhauled from the bottom up, it considerably enhances performance, particularly for disk streaming. The new Eco mode also helps lighten the computer’s load, which comes in especially handy when you’re composing.
Compatibility
The Grand 2 supports the prevailing plug-in formats VST, DXi and AU. It also integrates into Pro Tools®, courtesy of ReWire support. And with the standalone version, you can even use The Grand 2 without a host application.
The Verdict
For those of us who have tried, you'll know it's a difficult thing to record a grand piano. The first thing you need, of course, is to find such an instrument, in tune, and set about the task of setting up microphones - easier said than done, so it was clear that when Steinberg introduced The Grand in it's original guise it would be received with interest. This version, The Grand 2, is actually two expensive sampled grand pianos, together with the noise of the hammers, (particularly pleasing at the higher end of the keyboard) and offers us variations as to tonal quality - natural, soft, bright or hard - with different levels of ambience and reverb, as would be appropriate for different venues, and pedal control. As you would expect, this takes up a fair amount of hard drive space, something approaching 4Gb, and is fairly RAM intensive, although there are ways within the programme to ease this situation a bit if your computer is not quite what it could be. It needs a copy protection key - a dongle - to enable it to work and this is not supplied. If you already have a Steinberg dongle such as for Cubase, then transfer the licence to this; otherwise you'll need to buy one on top of the cost of the programme (but when one considers the cost of a grand piano it puts things in perspective).
The instrument can be used in stand-alone mode, or as a plug-in - VST, DXi, AU....it's very flexible, and is cross-platform, so works with Mac or PC.
So how does it sound? Like a grand piano. Excellent. We didn't feel that as pianists here at Software Editorial that we could do it justice, so a friendly professional pianist helped us out. We were taken from Beethoven to Scott Joplin and back to Schubert; the only criticism was regarding the keyboard - as you would expect, to get the best from this software a weighted full size keyboard would be preferable. So to sum up - if you need a "real" piano for your compositions, or indeed for live performances with a laptop, then The Grand 2 would be an excellent choice.
Steinberg The Grand 2 Review