Chocolate Audio O.D.D. Grand Piano

Already having four pianos in our product line, two of which are very sought-after top-notch models, made the choice for a new piano difficult at first, but very rewarding in the end in our humble opinion.

What we find sometimes, in sampled pianos, is a lack of personality as to try to fulfil the dream of the perfect piano. As any accomplished piano player knows, though, such a piano might only exist for a single player, not for the world-wide community of piano players. So, among other ventures we are developing, we decided to do an odd, peculiar piano.

1. We deliberately chose to sample the piano with full detail (11 dynamic levels) but stop before the “ff” dynamic, to have a piano with a warm and intimate sound.
2. We chose a very good sounding Yamaha C6.
3. We chose and carefully placed no less than 29 microphones around the piano in order to achieve many different sound signatures.
4. We chose one of the best studios in Italy, Art&Music Studios.
5. We chose microphones which do not represent common choices for recording “perfect pianos”, but mics we found were complementing the sound we had in our minds and hearts.
6. We compiled and edited the whole thing as a set of 3 soulful and colorful instruments.

Features

• 20.56 GB (lossless compressed) library size, 20496 samples
• 3 NKI Instrument Files, each representing a different take on the same piano, the result of different odd mic techniques being put to good use
• 3 sets of 4 microphones
• Oneiric Piano: AKG C414B-TLII, Wunder Audio CM7 FET, AKG C460-CK1, AKG C451E-CK22
• Dark Piano: AEA N22, Earthworks SR77, Beyerdynamic M88N(C), AEA N8
• Dreamy Piano: AKG D190E, AKG C414B-ULS, Crown PZM30D, Sennheiser MD211
• 11 sustaining dynamic layers, chromatically sampled
• 8 release trails layers, chromatically sampled
• independently controllable sustain-pedal resonances
• key-release noise for added authenticity
• sustain-pedal down and up noise layers
• sampled with Millennia, Neve, Heritage Audio, CAPI, SSL and Focusrite preamps through an SSL Duality 48 analog mixing console
• all of the details of the piano recreated through the use of our custom advanced scripting
• released at 24 bit / 44.1 KHz
• easy-to-use mixer for extreme sound-mangling

Three (or more) Pianos in One
O.D.D Gran Piano is made up of 3 Kontakt NKI Instrument files.

Dark Piano

A ribbon-mic based combination, bringing a lot of personality and some precious darkness with an edge.

1. 2 x AEA N22 matched pair in AB configuration on the listener side

2. 2 x Earthworks SR77 matched pair on the end tail of the piano

3. A single vintage Beyerdynamic M88N(C) capturing the bassy tone of the holes

4. 2 x AEA N8 matched pair in Blumlein configuration up high and 2.5 meters away on the listener side

Dreamy Piano

Based on dynamic mics and the odd end of the piano (its bottom side) creates an edgy and wide sound palette.

1. 2 x vintage, cheap but amazingly good AKG D190E on the player side in a wide AB

2. A single AKG C414B-ULS placed on the floor underneath the piano body

3. 2 x Crown PZM30D placed between the legs and the harmonic board, one next to the low strings, the other next to the higher registers

4. A single vintage dynamic omni Sennheiser MD211 on the ground as room mic

Sound a-la-carte
One might think that having 3 NKI Instruments, each featuring four different choices and combinations of mics plus the reverb would make finding the perfect balance impossible. It is not.
These Instruments, we believe, easily open up many different sonic worlds by using its on-board mixer. This tool is focused on easy-to-get results with a few tailored controls:

‘Tuning your sound

– Volume, does what it’s supposed to do

– Pan, places the sound in a specific direction

– Mute and Solo
– Width, controls the width of the stereo signals

– Reverb Send, amount of signal for each microphone that gets processed by the on-board IR Reverb

– Master effects are a 3-band EQ with cherry-picked frequency centers, a Preset Compressor & Tape Emulation and the IR Reverb
– On each single channel you might use a simple but very effective 3-band EQ

Simplicity, with depth
Our approach to sampled Instruments is to let the musician in you fly free of any technical burden. Fast, full satisfaction is guaranteed: you just need to play, the fastest possible learning-curve is always kept as a reference when designing our Instruments. At the same time, when there’s that techie-need to tweak and fine-tune, our multi-layer user interfaces allow for it, giving you the best of both worlds.

Advanced sampling and scripting
We believe the real break-through in these ages is creating advanced, high-quality Instruments which don’t require you to earn a master in computer programming before you start making music with them. Making matters easy for the musician always means introducing more and more layers of complication for us developers. First of all we are musicians, and we don’t want you to end up putting our products on a virtual shelf and forget about them because they are too hard to learn and use.

Preset-galore
Our effects section doesn’t require a degree in audio-engineering to make the best out of it.

This is our job.
Just select one of the 71 main Presets and fine tune it using a few carefully selected parameters.

The Compressor & Tape Emulation section, usually hard to grasp for the inexpert in audio tweaking feature no less than 22 22 (for when using a single Mic only, marked with a sign)  presets with a simple Amount knob to rule it to your taste.

Custom IR Reverbs you can use (Really!!!)
The Reverb section, so critical for acoustic pianos in particular, features an 100% in-house developed collection of 101 carefully selected high quality Impulse Responses coming from both real spaces and revered vintage and contemporary studio hardware.

Key Level Trimming
Added with Version 1.5, MIDI key-based level trimming allows you to further customize the dynamic response of the piano based on your keyboard action, taste and listening environment.