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Has anybody played this sampled Grand from Bardstown Audio or has other experience with it?

They say it is the todays best Sampled 24bit Grand.

<a href="http://www.bardstownaudio.com/frames/CD-Bos.html"> Their homepage and audio demos </a>

[Edit] Yeah listen to the demo,wow!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ChrisWerner on 2003-06-11 17:06 ]</font>

Yeah, i played the Bosendorfer Imperial Grand model 290 the giga version...Converted in exs24mk2 format, and he also has a 'very lite' version of it that he made for his sts....

Sound pretty...GRAND... for sure!




<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: marcuspocus on 2003-06-11 17:19 ]</font>

Indeed, I guess the Solaris must wait, sorry John.
I will go for the 24bit Kontakt Version.

please Chris, rethink this again
those hyper large ultra real piano samples really don't make it as a 'more realistic' piano - despite the ads.
No question, the samples are beautiful, but you'll almost never play the instrument yourself as it was recorded.
A piano without real string resonance can never be a (realistic) piano.
Do the test in a music shop with all the Kawai and Clavinova home stuff.
Compare one of the regular acoustic instruments with the simple digital ones.
For example press a-minor with your left hand and keep the keys pressed while hitting staccato a,c,e with your right hand. That's a completely different sound caused by triggering the passivly pressed keys. The top stage pianos from Kawai and GEM have exactly that resonating feature and once you've noticed it you'll never want to miss it. The 'playability' of a piano isn't related to the sample size at all.

cheers, Tom

That´s an interesting point Tom.
I canceled my thought to buy this sampled Grand because Kontakt has big problems with his direct from disk feature. If you use Kontakt try to play/record several tracks in DFD. After 5 tracks it beguns to struggle. And the big shit happens when you mixdown multi tracks in DFD mode, some tracks simply vanished. I think the Grand won´t work with Kontakt on my System, I have no SCSI.
What a pitty and I thought it is a good thing to buy this, it would save much space in my room and much money.

Thank you Tom.

Maybe Kontakt have problems, but exs24mk2 doesn't have any...

I can load The grand + a GigaHarp + lotsa strings without any glytches at all in it.

But, anyway, if you have a nice+small enough piano (200-300meg), sts is still the best to use... no latency, no hardrive usage at all, suberb filters and lotsa modulation possibilities (like filtering on velocity, which even gigastudio can't do...)

I have a home made piano prg. made on an EMU6400 converted to sts and tweaked to the bone, and frankly, it sound beautifull...More life into it than the grand...Maybe not a Bosendorfer that was sampled, but still sound magnificent...

My .02$

I´ve complete the download of the Maestro Concert Grand, a sampled Yamaha CF-3 with 8 Layers around 895MB. -Bosones link in the sts forum. Now I will try it with Kontakt, maybe I´am satisfied soon.
I´ll keep you in touch.

Yiiipeejaaaeee, it´s done.

What a nightmare this was, I download the Maestro Concert Piano a sampled Yamaha CF-3.
It tooks around 2 or 3 hours till I downloaded the aprox. 630MB zip file from Bosones link in the STS Forum.
Around 50 percent I got a message: Drive C: is full do yaa wanna clean up ey ? In fact I saved the zip on drive d: another HD but anyway I moved my VST folder and made around 400 MB space free for everything to come.
Then I downloaded the NS Drumkit V6 before I did anything with the Piano.
After that I was very curious to play this 895 MB Piano and opened the zip.

Ey, this zip is not a valid zip file and when you downloaded it, just try it again..aaaarghhhh...

I restart the download. Of course I moved the VST folder back to C: because D: is my Audio drive except the VSTi stuff........

My partner in our room said, let me download this file, he sits on an Acorn Computer, much things are simply better than Microsoft. Okay I agreed, stoped my second attempt and went to a date I had.

After 4 hours I came back and asked for the Piano zip file, he was burning it to CD, good timing, I thought.
I copied the zip to my D: HD and start Winzip, hurray the file was valid now, I start the extraction to my D: drive.
After 30 percent my drive was full?

I erased the first zip file and restart the extraction, my drive was full after 30 percent, "what have I done I shouted, and to whomsoever? Why this Grand don´t like me? Why nobody likes me, why I make music, my life passed before my eyes in seconds..."

After a cup of coffee I changed the temp and work folder of winzip, killed a DVD movie on D: and go for my third attempt to extract this f...... piano. It worked now, a 895MB gig file looked at me and sayed come on you are not ready yet, you haven´t got Gigasampler.

...Be quite I banish you on CD safety first... done.

I opened Kontakt and import the gig program file. Kontakt starts to work, a status bar appeared and no change was to see. Anyway I heard my HD was rotating very fast and I decieded to let it work awhile. Good decision. After 5min or so Kontakt asked me for a folder to store the new instrument. ´ok`

The screen vanished but the HD was rotating again. 5min later the file was stored and Kontakt shows a loaded Maestro Concert Piano in his rack. Should I play a note?

No, I saved the file again with all samples, safety first..... 5min.

Now the time had come and I was shure that I have won. I hit a G on my keyboard as carefully as John holds his new born baby for his first time. Klaaaannnng. I hit it stronger to believe it is working. I played other notes, I hit some Cluster, I played the piano in a Saucerful Of Secrets-Pink Floyd style, just put my arms all over my keyboard, it works and it sounds great.
Not a Boesendorfer but after I add the Piano Reverb of Kontakt I was in love, I went to sleep.

Download the Piano it´s for free and yes it works....

Thanks for listening

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ChrisWerner on 2003-06-13 01:14 ]</font>

Chris, does it (MaestroGrand) work perfectly for you?
I downloaded it and tried with EXSmkII and got awful glitches and crackles and pops... just like I had some sync problems but there aren't, other samples work well.
It sounds pretty beatiful otherwise, but every now and then begins a hell of crackling.

Can I somehow use it with STS? STS doesn't seem to support gigasamples.

Hi spoimala,
the grand works perfect with the new Kontakt version,I had to import the gig file, only.
The STS didn´t import gig files, at least I can´t remember that.
Unluckily I can´t say anything about the EXS mkII. Sorry.

Hey spoimala!

In exs24MKII do you have the Streaming active??????


Load a exs24MKII instance in a audioinstrement channel, don't load any program yet, click on option, the last choice of this menu is 'virtual memory', you HAVE to activate this, then set the harddrive speed to 'very slow' and disk usage to very high (this way, exs will optimize loading of samples for a really buzy machine, giving you extreme performance).

With this setting, I can load :

1 Bosendorfer (1.5gig) with 64 notes of polyphony
1 grand meastro (895meg) with 64 notes
1 gigaharp (700meg) with 64 notes

And there is not a single glitch...

All this with ULLI@3ms

flawless....

just on a side note, what astroman points out makes composing on virtual pianos very hard. because there is no resonance between the strings, it will most always take more notes on a sampled piano than ona real piano to get a "full" sound. So it sometimes sounds strange to play a tune written for real piano on a sampled piano, and vice versa because essentially the two instruments don't work in the same way.

Whether or not you compose on a real piano will affect how you write a tune. Keep that in mind as you use the samples. ("not too full" on virt. piano will be "so-so ok" on real piano)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: kensuguro on 2003-07-03 14:24 ]</font>

That absolutly true Tom and Ken. It begins when you haven´t got a weighted keyboard, to play a Piano with plastic unweighted keys is terrible. I can compare the sound with the Niendorf Piano of my girlfriend. When I play the Niendorf or any other real Piano I feel the resonance and vibes from the wood, you can´t reach a real Piano with a sampled one, never. And that belongs to all other real instruments.
But the music world has become simple and most listeners don´t care of sampled instruments. They simply hear a Piano.
Also it is much cheaper to use that sampled things and it safes much space in my room.
But I must say that the Maestro Grand inspires me alot to play with it. I use it nearly every day to play along and get inspirations, melodies etc. It works for me and it reachs a real Piano in a small way at least.

Marcus, you ar my hero! Thank you very much!
Working great, also with 3ms ULLI. And sounds great. *HAPPY*

Ken, good points. But as I live in a small flat in a apartment building, I don't have a real piano. So I will compose, too, on a sampled piano
Hmm.. what if I go live...

Chris, yes, weighted keys are a necessity.
I have often found real pianos sound worse than this Maestro... weird as it is. But real pianos need to be perfectly tuned, need service, perfect room etc.. which they usually don't have.
The only thing I've heard to sound very nice is the big Concert Grand of Yamaha (don't remember the model name) I once playd in a concert hall... man, it was so great! Just push one key and enjoy I could even FEEL the sound. Not possible with samples


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: spoimala on 2003-07-05 06:08 ]</font>

Spoimala, I think those samples sound so great because the pianos are miked with top of the line equipment you can hardly afford unless you run a big professional studio.
I guess this from all reports I've read about the sampling process, Kawai once documented this nicely for their 9000 series.
My rule of thumb is to use a sampled one for recording, but preferably a real world instrument in 'unplugged' situations.
Of course this depends on your environement too, players like me can be a real torture for their neighborhood
I'm sticking with a GEM Realpiano expander which has rather crappy samples (or some issue in it's analog circuitry, I dunno), but I like it's resonance feature. Recently I spiced it up tremendously with an analog Kawai EQ-8 - matches perfectly, but strangely I never succeeded to get that sound out of the SFP eqs

cheers, tom

right. the convenience of sampled instruments is always unbeatable. But it's great you've found such an inspiring piano sound. actually, maybe I should check it out too since I haven't heard any piano sounds that really inspire me. I'd be happy to find one.

Try it Ken it´s worth the download. After you placed the Piano in a Grand Hall you will be inspired, too.
There is a new version out, it contains the key release sounds now. When you have downloaded version one allready, you can download the key release sounds as a single sample bank, too. This is crazy a 33MB sample bank for release sounds only.
Anyway I load the release sounds to the same midi channel as the Piano and it works. *Plock*

Everyone should chech PMI's grandioso series also! very impressive i would say they are even better!!!

http://www.postaudiomedia.com

I've got a question on this topic, though it might just as well fall into the STSSampler Forum. Does this set of samples constitute one grand piano or is there several models? And if so, what's the largest model in MB? I just got a GB of RAM for my laptop which will soon be my audio machine. I'm curious to see whether I can use Chicken Systems Translator to STSify the Giga files and just load it all into memory.

Thanks in advance,
Sam

The bosendorfer Grand is 1.5gig

And you wont't be able to load it into sts, even with 1gig of ram.