Adam Monroe Music - Austrian Grand Piano V.1.2 (KONTAKT/VST)

Adam Monroe's Austrian Grand is a grand piano sample library for Windows VST and Kontakt. This library was created by sampling a 100 year old Bruder Mikula Wien grand piano through a stereo-pair of AEA R84 ribbon microphones. It exists to fill the gap between bright and mellow piano libraries. This vsti features 10 velocity layers, 2 note round-robin, and over 4 gigs of sampled data. Reverb can be incrementally added, and frequency cuts can be triggered via toggle switches to assist the user in shaping the instrument's tone. The piano has a semi-bright, yet warm, aged-tone. Subtle key noise was left in to add to the realism of the library. The VST version features multi-threaded double buffering and fast C-style arrays and performs well, even on older computers and in lower latencies.

Sampling originally began by recording through an additional pair of Oktava Mk-012's to capture room ambience, but early on it was determined that the piano's tone was best captured by the ribbon mics, and that potentially increasing the size of the sample library by several gigs to include room ambience would not significantly improve the sound.

Do to high-gain signal-noise unique to ribbons, quite a bit of noise became present when building the sample library. Noise from the ribbons is negligible, but when stacking 30-40 notes on top of eachother (such as in a sample library) the noise compounds and becomes quite noticeable. Therefore, the extra step of de-noising the samples was taken. Noise wasn't removed completely - to avoid making the sample library sterile - and a faint "hiss" can be heard if you listen to the library carefully. For some people, some noise is desirable, but it can further be reduced by engaging the "4kHz cut" switch, as this is where most of the microphone noise tends to propagate.

This virtual instrument can be a great addition to your collection, as it fills a nice niche between bright sterile pianos (like Yamaha's) and smooth, mellow pianos (like Faziolis). We were happy we could save such an old piano and turn it into a unique sample instrument and VST/Audio Unit.