zircon Posted April 8, 2015 Share Posted April 8, 2015 Fresh off the presses! We're very pleased to announce the release of PEARL Concert Grand for KONTAKT and KONTKAT PLAYER!TRAILER This lovely instrument features a beautifully-recorded Yamaha C7 with four microphone perspectives, each offering a unique and lush sound. The library is designed to be a joy to play, use, and edit - it's mixed to perfection and suitable for most any style of composition, from warm and emotional film scores to jazz, classical & romantic music and more. Why make another piano library? Simply put - we fell in love with this piano & hall, and wanted to make a timeless, eminently playable instrument. Like many composers I have a ton of piano libraries, but now, I only reach for Pearl. It has the ideal 'touch' and creamy tone that inspires me every time I press a key. I could not be happier with how it came out! Features * 14,000+ samples in both 16 and 24 bit fidelity * 8 dynamic layers * 2 round robins * Pedal on & off samples * Chromatically sampled w/ key and pedal release noises * Four mic positions: close, pedal, stage, hall * Elegant yet powerful script: * Per-channel routing, EQ, compression, width and volume * Global analog modeled FX including 30+ custom impulse responses * Custom velocity curve and (micro)tuning, plus master presets included Demos https://soundcloud.com/isworks/sets/pearl-concert-grand-demos Pricing & Availability Pearl is available NOW for Kontakt & Kontakt Player (5.3+) at the no-brainer intro price of $99 through April 21st. Visit the link below for more information, tech requirements, video and more: http://impactsoundworks.com/pearl-concert-grand/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pl511 Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 Man, this sounds good. I want! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nabeel Ansari Posted April 9, 2015 Share Posted April 9, 2015 Buy it. It's good! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nase Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 piano, eh? good luck...but i guess it's an obligatory thing for a sampling studio to make at some point? but if you're a fan of it yourself and use it lots, that's cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
timaeus222 Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 I think it's an objectively fantastic tone, honestly. It's definitely worth it IMO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nase Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 i buy that. it's just i've seen so many sampled pianos that sound great and are reportedly very playable, and i still get by fine with onboard library and free stuff. i'm not saying everyone can, but i think with pianos the sampling standard is so high that it's near impossible to come up with something that raises the bar. so i question the business aspect, and i think i can say that here without any negative impact. but it's all good, it can still be a fun and worthwhile endeavour to sample one more piano. and maybe it becomes a reference piano magically, who the hell knows lol. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chernabogue Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 Just wanted to congratulate the video editor, it was a very nice and effective trailer. And the samples/demo sound really good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted April 11, 2015 Author Share Posted April 11, 2015 True that piano is a commonly sampled instrument. However much like how there are many guitars out there, it comes down to: * The sound of the piano itself * The hall * Micing * Editing * Scripting We really pushed to make something great in all 5 areas there. The piano sounds wonderful. No ringing frequencies. The note attacks 'feel' right - they're not chopped off. The dynamic curve is very carefully tweaked to perfection. The script gives you a lot of control while staying simple. Lots of built-in convolution. There are 4 mic perspectives that *dramatically* change the sound. I wanted to create a piano that would retire all my other pianos, and that's what we've done here. Plus at $99 for Kontakt Player it is one of the most, if not the most, affordable piano libraries out there given the amount of content. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan! Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 This sounds great. Do you have any samples of it being played in mono? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted April 11, 2015 Author Share Posted April 11, 2015 I can make one! What kind of style do you want to hear? The pedal mic is mono by default. The other three can be collapsed to mono easily. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jonathan! Posted April 11, 2015 Share Posted April 11, 2015 I am not too bothered about style - something classical would be great. I am particularly interested in the closer mics if possible? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nabeel Ansari Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 (edited) i think with pianos the sampling standard is so high that it's near impossible to come up with something that raises the bar. I think this is so far from the truth, as someone who uses newer pianos often. We've got a ways to go in terms of sampling the piano in a total fashion. Damper resonance is still a mystery. We kinda approximate it by having individual notes recorded with dampers off, but that's just not the same sound, and if you think about it from a physics standpoint, it makes sense why. The sound of sympathetic resonance of one note is not the same as the sound of sympathetic resonance of more than one note. Layering recordings and superposing wave propagation are two different things. Never mind the fact that a C7 is a unique tone, and the alternatives for a good C7 are: -Ivory II (which is good, but expensive, and not Kontakt) -8dio 1990 Concert Grand (This literally just came out a couple weeks before Pearl did and its feature list looks great, but it costs twice as much, and requires full Kontakt) Edited April 12, 2015 by Neblix Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nase Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 (edited) i think the notion of "sampling in a total fashion" is a bit silly. you'd have to record every possible sound. and in the end you'd have to build a perfect piano interface that looks and feels just like a piano so you can play it just like one. see the problem? even when you record every possible sound something can do (nearly impossible), the interface is still an abstraction (although a very close one because piano is a keyboard instrument, duh.) say you want prepared piano and the top piano sampling library of the year 2099 has a wealth of dynamically playable prepared piano sounds, in the billions. you'd still be lacking the perfect interface to play them, which is something that actually looks and feels haptically like a prepared piano. you'd have to build a prepared piano. ok, this gets MORE SILLY when you approach other instruments that don't have a keyboard at all. it's simple, all sample libraries are and will stay approximations. certainly closer ones, but you cannot argue against the "good enough" effect taking place with keyboards more than any other instrument. computer music interfaces use piano logic, s'all. that's why modeling pianos with a computer is easier than modeling guitars with one. atleast in the way they're played traditionally. velocity and discrete semitones. no pitchbend, no glide, no vibrato, no swells, etc. sympathetic resonance and all, i won't say thats not valid, but cmon, it's pretty subtle. and you got it on other stringed instruments as well. so this is not meant as an attack on the library at all. you simply got me into debate mode now but i'll stop. good luck! edit: i think the thing here is, my use of the phrase "raising the bar" annoyed you as a developer. it's great that you're interested in the intricacies of piano sampling. sure, the bar will be raised technically. and i'm sure it'll sound nice too. i'm more talking from a 'consumer' perspective, i guess. Edited April 12, 2015 by Nase Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nabeel Ansari Posted April 12, 2015 Share Posted April 12, 2015 (edited) i think the notion of "sampling in a total fashion" is a bit silly. you'd have to record every possible sound. and in the end you'd have to build a perfect piano interface that looks and feels just like a piano so you can play it just like one. see the problem? even when you record every possible sound something can do (nearly impossible), the interface is still an abstraction (although a very close one because piano is a keyboard instrument, duh.)say you want prepared piano and the top piano sampling library of the year 2099 has a wealth of dynamically playable prepared piano sounds, in the billions. you'd still be lacking the perfect interface to play them, which is something that actually looks and feels haptically like a prepared piano. you'd have to build a prepared piano. ok, this gets MORE SILLY when you approach other instruments that don't have a keyboard at all. it's simple, all sample libraries are and will stay approximations. certainly closer ones, but you cannot argue against the "good enough" effect taking place with keyboards more than any other instrument. computer music interfaces use piano logic, s'all. that's why modeling pianos with a computer is easier than modeling guitars with one. atleast in the way they're played traditionally. velocity and discrete semitones. no pitchbend, no glide, no vibrato, no swells, etc. sympathetic resonance and all, i won't say thats not valid, but cmon, it's pretty subtle. and you got it on other stringed instruments as well. so this is not meant as an attack on the library at all. you simply got me into debate mode now but i'll stop. good luck! edit: i think the thing here is, my use of the phrase "raising the bar" annoyed you as a developer. it's great that you're interested in the intricacies of piano sampling. sure, the bar will be raised technically. and i'm sure it'll sound nice too. i'm more talking from a 'consumer' perspective, i guess. I understand exactly what you're saying; however, I come from a community of people where subtlety is everything and "good enough" is not even close to good enough. These are the people who will buy 4 string libraries because each one of them has a specific tone that they want for different occasions, and when they have a sound they want they can't make, they'll pay Spitfire or 8Dio or whatever to make a new one. As you immerse yourself more in the world of mock-ups and sample realism, I think you'd be surprised how picky and discriminating your ears can get. It's just like anything else: mixing, mastering, recording quality, etc. There's satisfaction for the listeners, and then there's satisfaction for the artists themselves. To address sympathetic resonance, sure, I guess you can say it's subtle. But I play piano, and I notice subtle differences in every piano I play, real and fake. They're important to me, even if they're not important to *everyone*. Sure, it's very different from how you approach it, but to say there's no market for it (which I feel you implied in your questioning of the business aspect) and that the bar can not be raised (people have different bars, and developers' bars can go much higher) is, I think, a little inaccurate. Even if you completely ignore the market of mock-up producers (I'm blanketing any and all professional game/film/TV composers into this term) who care a lot about subtlety, it's still competitive simply because it's $99 on Kontakt Player. The alternatives at that level are things like the Grandeur from NI, which I can't speak on because I haven't tried it, but it's not a C7, so it sounds different. I also don't like your argument about interface being a reductio ad absurdem, because it seems absurd to you, but *not* absurd at all to me. Yamaha just created the NU1, which is a real piano that lacks strings, and sends MIDI data. The hammers are real and everything, they just hit a soft sheet. The sound is sample-based. And well, I think the NU1 is amazing, and there is clearly a market for it, which to me, isn't "silly" at all, it's pretty amazing. Also, keep in mind most technological innovations seemed "silly" or "extraneous" when they were created, so I think that applies here as well. But take my words with a grain of salt, since my life is dedicated to things like "advancing music technology". I'm intrinsically wired to disagree with everything you said. xP The bottom line is, I can reassure you that there is in fact a market for "total sampling". I talk to those kinds of people on all the time. They're always saying "I wish someone made a library that had this or this or this", people are always sending messages to companies like CineSamples and saying "can you record triple stops in the expansion?" People definitely do care about subtleties. I do too. You know what grates me about Cinematic Strings 2? The legato is true legato, but it doesn't give you any volume control over the legato transition sample. That gets on my nerves, a lot, because CineSamples has it in all of their libraries. CS2 also doesn't have divisi. Which I really want. Most people don't even know what divisi even sounds like. But since I know what it is, and understand what it can do for me, I want it. Same with con sordino, and other "esoteric" sampling projects. I guess I find it offensive that you call it "silly", because, well, perfectionism is not silly at all, and it's rampant in the scoring world. I'd rather be unsatisfied than satisfied, because "good enough" is for the audience, not for the artist. And a final disclaimer, I had no direct involvement in the development of Pearl, and have no personal motivation to defend it because it's something I made that someone said isn't amazing (because... well, I didn't make it xP). I am simply disagreeing with you on principle because I see value in something that you don't. Which is fine, you're allowed to like whatever you like. It's a free universe. Edited April 12, 2015 by Neblix Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nase Posted April 13, 2015 Share Posted April 13, 2015 The bottom line is, I can reassure you that there is in fact a market for "total sampling". dude haha, everone who browses kvr would know that. what i say is personal opinion ofc. my point of view is: realism is overrated. character is where it's at. i've become good at making whack samples sound interesting. that's one of my things. i suppose this site helped a bit at that; listening to people like mazedude. i like big multisamples, don't get me wrong, but i have a limit. i think some of the everything buyers are more of the lazy kind, and that's ok. you can do a lot to one piano sound with the right effects though. again, i'm not really saying anything about the library, so sorry for derailing. i think the piano sounds pretty. i'd use it if i had it. just don't need another one. good luck, maybe we should stop it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted April 13, 2015 Author Share Posted April 13, 2015 For your viewing / listening pleasure, here is a video walkthrough of Pearl showing the interface and the multitude of sounds you can get from it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SnappleMan Posted April 13, 2015 Share Posted April 13, 2015 This piano sounds so good. I mean the piano itself, and it's recorded super well and the programming is super playable. Completely replaces my other "fully sampled" piano sounds. Close mic with a little bit of stage mic blend responds perfectly to EQ, making it perfect for rock and pop. Zircon and ISW I love you guys, keep doing great work. For real. Mega impressed with this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wiesty Posted April 14, 2015 Share Posted April 14, 2015 Dayummmm, I do love me some C7... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zircon Posted April 15, 2015 Author Share Posted April 15, 2015 We just updated PEARL to v1.1, adding a brand new "Dynamics Editor" feature. This allows you to customize the tone and timbre for every key on the keyboard. For example if you want to hear darker notes in the low register but brighter in the midrange, you can do that very easily and fluidly. Plus we fixed a couple bugs... one very major and one minor... so the instruments sounds and responds even better now! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.