This collection of EZkeys MIDI comes with a broad selection of playing styles inspired by contemporary country pop where the piano plays a leading role. Expect timeless country elements fused with catchy pop phrasing, epic hooks and big melodies.
Piano Pop EZkeys MiDi MAC
This is the best sounding budget piano VST option that is currently available. The Addictive Keys Steinway is sampled after the Steinway D Grand piano and this is a heavily sought after piano.
Note: If you purchase a Focusrite interface, you will receive this for free. This is a nice win as you will get an upgrade in possibly your audio interface as well as your piano VSTS.
My personal favorite sound from Keyscape is the LA Custom 7 Stage preset. You can adjust the character of the piano as well as the pedal noise. These are two features that I think add a lot of realness to the piano VSTS.
As I mentioned above, you can play around with the pedal noise and mechanical noises in order to dive deeper into the realm of organic. Keyscape also features overtones when you hold out a note just like a real piano would.
While the electric pianos steal a lot of the thunder with Keyscape, I still really love the grand and upright pianos. Yes, the price is high, but you are also getting a massive library that brings a ton of different options for your songs.
A funny story I was just having with a beginner keyboardist was that they just purchased this VST and they were using their old Casio keyboard with it. They are absolutely blown away by Keyscape and piano plugins in general, as am I.
Pedal noises and silent strikes are also included with this piano VST. This is when a key is pressed, but not actually hammering the strings. In total, there are 19 total velocity layers.
The Ravenscroft 275 is hands down one of the better sounding piano VSTs available. You are given all of the essentials for dynamics as well as some great piano samples that I think are fantastic.
Pianoteq 7 is a modeled piano that has the ability to provide you with incredibly real subtleties organic elements that sample pianos struggle with. With this being said, it will definitely come down to preference as some people just always prefers samples to models.
For example, if someone is trying to sample a piano, they are going to have the pianist press down the same note hundreds of times at different velocities and different lengths. This allows the sample to capture as much realism as it possibly can.
MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface. This is the language that allows instruments, computers, and other hardware to communicate. For example, if I am trying to record a piano piece into my DAW, the MIDI note values will be captured to a grid.
In my opinion, a lot of physically modeled pianos sound plastic and cheap. With that being said, one of the most popular options, and one that we will get into is Pianoteq. This is a physically modeled piano and it is one of the more popular piano VSTS available.
While I prefer sampled pianos, I have heard and played some pretty atrocious samples. Sampling comes down to the engineers, the room that they are capturing, the mics, the placement of the mics, quality of the pianos.
Now, if you have a lot of experience, you may completely disagree with me and absolutely love physically modeled pianos. That is totally your opinion and there will be a ton of people who agree with you and a ton who disagree.
Our producer started showing us VSTS and my mind was completely blown. Piano VSTS can sound out of this world. You can take a cheap keyboard and make it sound like a Mason & Hamlin or a Steinway & Sons through the use of piano plugins.
I personally believe that piano VSTS sound much better than digital pianos or keyboards. If you run your keyboard through a DAW such as Ableton Live for when you gig, you can create a set that allows you to access your favorite sounds.
My personal opinion is that using piano VSTS is a far better route than using a digital piano. While there are going to be some people who may disagree, I personally just love finding and playing new VSTS and I believe they sound better and better in time.
Another thing that you can do is figure out what it is that you like in a piano. Do you like warm sounding pianos or do you prefer bright? I mentioned earlier, but for some reason, I just really love warm and dark sounding pianos. They seem to have an element of emotion to them in my opinion.
When you decide on a piano VST, you can often search through different presets before then tweaking it to your liking. I strongly advise you to search through each preset. You never know which you will end up liking the most.
Absolutely not. If the library is massive, this is in a way an indication of how well the pianos were recorded and processed. What this means in simpler terms is that in order to truly sample a piano in the best way, the engineer should be hitting each note hundreds of times and different velocities.
The final size of the library will mainly come down to the format and audio compression. When you read about the sampling process for each piano VST, you will want to look for lossless audio compression. This is most common amongst the higher-end sample libraries. What this does is preserves the exact copy of the original audio.
One of the more popular piano VSTS is the Garritan CFX Concert Grand. It comes in less than 20GB, but once you install and decompress it to PCM it requires more than 100GB of space. For this reason, I recommend that you find one piano VST that you really love and just keep that installed. You can always reinstall as you go as well.
With all of this storage talk, I strongly you advise you to keep it in mind, however, let your ear guide you to where you go. One thing to note is that you will want to have a fast PC or Macbook in order to run some of these nicer piano plugins.
Agreed and so I love Pianoteq too. They are the only piano VST maker and company that has a large number of approved or authorized instruments from the piano manufacturers themselves. And what I really love about Pianoteq is that they are constantly updating or improving the quality of their instruments unlike the sampled counterparts available in the market.
You might not even own a full-length, 88-key digital piano, but may only have a MIDI keyboard with 49 or even 25 keys. Yet you will still be able to score that grand piano sound with the power of MIDI editing.
For instance, opening the Kontakt player in a DAW will open a window where you can select the sound your piano will produce on a certain track. Selecting a trumpet sound will output your piano to sound like a trumpet.
When you connect your digital keyboard to your computer and use sampled piano sounds through a sample library, you are transferring the note you play on your keyboard into a MIDI format.
VST instruments offer a range of options for your recording needs. You may not like the preset sounds in your digital keyboard, or you may want to broaden your sound palette with different piano samples or to experiment with other instruments.
This may seem confusing, but you can use your digital piano as a MIDI controller, allowing you to play notes in a piano fashion, while your computer will output them as other instruments, such as a guitar or a violin, via VSTs.
Vocalists often ask me for a piano-backing track for a performance, but they need it in a different key. Instead of playing in another key and re-recording the original performance, I can move the MIDI notes in my DAW to transpose the sound.
If you wish to use a few samples for different sounding pianos, you may work easily from a single computer or laptop and will not need a lot of RAM to do so (at least 16GB is recommended, but 8GB RAM is still workable).
There is no one answer to this question. A good place to start is to identify which acoustic piano brand produces the sound you prefer, whether a Steinway, Bösendorfer, Yamaha grand piano, etc.
Many of these brands to have been recorded meticulously into sample libraries. You may also wish to have a piano sample for a particular style, such as a solo performance, a piano be blended in with an orchestra, or a recording in a jazz or rock band.
But even then, this is not an optimal solution. The built-in speakers of digital pianos are usually designed to work best with preset sounds and may not sound great when connected to external audio sources.
Plus, the speakers on portable digital pianos and keyboards are hardly impressive, so it makes sense investing in a pair of good external speakers or headphones to get the most out of your VST plugin in terms of sound quality.
Keyscape is an incredibly large library with over 500 piano sounds and 36 instrument models and hybrid patches. The library can be hosted within Spectrasonics and integrated with the Omnisphere library.
The library includes various presets that provide immediate inspiration. I am a user of this piano library and rarely build a custom patch. I use a preset with tweaked moderations instead (such as pedal noise and reverb).
The Vienna Imperial virtual grand piano by Vienna Symphonic Library is recorded on the Bösendorfer 290-755 with a huge 1,200 of samples recorded per key applying a large magnitude of pianistic possibilities.
The interface has the option to view in Basic or Advanced View, where you can adjust frequencies, microphone positions (distant/audience position, middle/player position, or close/microphones placed in the body of the piano), convulsion reverb, pedal noises, sympathetic resonances, octave shift, and stereo width. 2ff7e9595c