Recording - April 2011 - 34

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Synthogy
by Gary Eskow

...where we bring you follow-up articles with application hints and upgrade news about gear already reviewed in Recording

Ivory II Grand Pianos
One of the best virtual pianos in the world gets even better

will love the C7. Those of us who like our porridge neither too hot nor cold will go for the Steinway. The quality of these sampled instruments (superb) was covered in our original review, as was the fact that you can layer the pianos with a variety of synth patches (not my favorite feature but it might suit you), so we’ll skip that stuff.

Ah, the elusive grand piano. To those who sample, it’s the great white whale of instruments. Will we ever reach the point where a piano costing as much as a good-sized house is faithfully reproduced by a computer hooked up to a MIDI controller? Maybe not, but the quality of sampled pianos is rising steadily. Synthogy’s Ivory II is getting tons of favorable press. Is it justified? Richard Shore and Mike Metlay reviewed Ivory in these pages when the original library was released in 2005, so we’ll forego mentioning all the stuff they covered. Suffice to say that you’ll need at least a 2.0 GHz Dual Core PowerPC G5 or 1.8 GHz Intel Core Duo machine (or its equivalent) and 77 GB of available of hard-drive space to launch this puppy. Ivory II installs as a standalone application (Ivory Standalone on Mac OS X 10.4.11 or better, Ivory Cantabile on Windows XP SP2, Vista, or 7, 32- or 64-bit) or as a VST, RTAS, or Audio Unit plug-in. Copy protection requires an iLok USB key, which isn’t included in the box. The pianos In their original sessions Synthogy partners Joe Ierardi and George Taylor (who met when both were employed by Kurzweil Music Systems) sampled three pianos: a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial Grand (you probably have one of those lying around the house), a Steinway D, and a Yamaha C7. These three beasts pretty much cover ever style imaginable. If you possess a huge technique like the late great Oscar Peterson you’ll probably gravitate towards the Bösendorfer. Hard rockers
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You can eq the pianos and add room ambience. If you’re playing live in a room that has weird acoustics you may take advantage of these capabilities, but if you’re using Ivory II in the studio you’ll either apply no eq or reverb (my preference) or add a dollop of your favorite convolution reverb. While we’re on the subject of parameters I’ll never use, let’s throw in timbre, chorus, stereo width, and the tons of variants on the basic pianos that are offered as presets. I’ve worked in the studio with some great pianists, and not one of them has ever asked an engineer to give him some slap-back in the ‘phones. What I’m really doing here is offering a backhanded compliment. These three pianos sound fabulous, and the new features for the piano sounds themselves—which we’ll get to presently— make Ivory II a must-buy, in my opinion. Unadorned presets of all three, that would do it for me! But the market must be demanding the bells and whistles—I see most manufacturers of sampled grands are offering them. And if you’re the sort who likes to play with your piano timbre (some genres demand it), Ivory certainly gives you great tools to do so. That having been said, I hope Synthogy will excuse me if I turn them all off and get back to these fantastic piano sounds! Touch and dynamic range and modeling, oh my! There are two tweakable parameters, Dynamic Range and Trim, that combine to yield a touch that I didn’t think I’d ever experience out of a sampled piano that has only 16 or 18 velocity layers. Initially, I

Recording - April 2011

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