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Newbie needs help with virtual synth


JonL

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I just bought an m-audio Keystation Pro 88 midi controller on ebay (haven't received it yet). I had been looking at a Yamaha S-90 ES, but that was just too expensive for me, so I decided to get a controller instead. I bought the m-audio unit because of the price ($200).

 

I played classical piano as a kid for 12 years. Now, 15 years later, I want to get back into it. Mainly, I wanted a setup that has a piano that sounds really good. It would be nice if I could have other sounds too (like the S-90 ES has).

 

What software do I need to buy? I have a software budget of around $200.

 

I was looking at the Garritan Steinway Piano Basic ($100) (unreleased

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There are many sampled pianos. Synthogy Ivory ( www.synthogy.com ) is probably regarded as the best of them, but it's around $300 usually. It requires a large amount of disk space (over 50GB), since every piano key is recorded 8 times at different volumes (soft to hard)

 

Pianoteq is the "other" modelled approach (that is, your computer "pretends" that it's a piano by using your CPU, not by using large recordings.) This approach takes much less memory and disk space, but often requires more CPU. Good news is there's a Pianoteq group buy coming up in a few days where people can save money http://www.pianoteq.com/groupbuy

 

Read up on both pages, listen to examples, and decide for yourself. There's too many other sampled piano products to even think about, and personal taste is a big factor. Most of them are reasonably good, and usually significantly better than what's available on any hardware outside of a Steinway (IE Yamaha, Roland workstations etc are going to provide noticeably inferior sounds)

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