NAMM: Scarbee Vintage Keyboard Virtual Instrument

(Click for a close-up)

Scarbee VKC combines the company's vintage electro mechanical keyboard libraries and Steinberg's virtual sampler technology in the form of the Halion Player, based on the HALion 3.1 sampler engine. Scarbee libraries now come ready to play 'out of the box' as standalone instruments for Apple OSX and Windows XP as well as a plugins in various interface formats: VSTi, AU, Dxi.

The Scarbee VKC includes the RSP73 - sound of Rhodes Stage Piano MK1 73T and WEP - sound of Wurlitzer 200AT electric pianos, as well as two new instruments which are 'hot off the press' - the 'D6-C' - sound of Hohner Clavinet D6T, sampled for each of the 4 standard pickup settings: DB, DA, CB, CA and also 1 with mute switch on: DBM, and the rare 'N-HP' - sound of Hohner Pianet NT.

With the D6-C, Scarbee introduces 'Horizontal Release Technology', whereby release samples are chosen from the wave pool depending on how long a key has been held - allowing a staccato played note to create a different release tone to a note which is sustained for a longer period. To achieve this, each key sampled on the D6-C has 24 release samples assigned to it alone.

The D6-C also makes use of HALion's advanced triggering options to allow the inclusion of the occasional 'off center' string strike, a well known characteristic of the original instrument. Sampled, mapped and programmed with great love and slavish attention to detail, the Scarbee Vintage Collection presents all of these classic electro mechanical instruments in their ultimate form.

At the core of the HALion Player housing the Vintage Keyboard Collection is the latest 3.1 version of the powerful HALion sampling engine from Steinberg. Capable of reproducing files in 32 bit resolution at sample rates up to 384kHz, a single instance of the player will play back up to 256 stereo voices on 16 MIDI channels, with 5 Stereo outputs. (Several instances of the Player can be loaded into a host simultaneously if desired.) HALion player can also connect even to any Rewire compatible Host application, for example Protools.

Scarbee VKC features 8 assignable editing knobs/switches in the Q-Control section, newly developed for V3.1 and presets can include various combinations and control of the high quality real-time FX, like Reverb, Phaser, Talkbox, Delay, EQ, BitCrusher, AutoWah and more (27 FX in total). Presets can also take advantage of the on board filters including: Notch / High Pass / Low Pass / Band Pass 12 dB and 24 dB Filter as well as the classic analog style Waldorf filters which feature a 'Fatness' function for overdriven filter sounds.

Scarbee Vintage Keyboard Collection will be priced $449 and will be shipping in 1Q 2005.