The 88 Series Model 7 Grand [2 DVD]

Chocolate Audio The 88 Series Model 7 Grand [2 DVD / Kontakt]

Top Model

The Model 7 grand piano was sampled from a Yamaha C7 grand coda piano. Our first idea was to sample a CFIII, but when we went to the rental-house we totally fell in love with this one and chose it. This particular piano has been in constant use since the  '80s in two highly praised concert halls in Torino (Italy) and has been played by artists like Michel Petrucciani and Chick Corea along the years. This piano is under constant maintenance by highly-skilled italian technicians. We sampled this little-big monster of a piano in a medium-size hall surrounded by a smorgasbord of microphones.

Macro-phones

We didn't settle for a single pair or a limited selection of microphones from the start, we wanted to make sure that the piano, after the sampling and editing process had the best chances to preserve its soul, something which can be hard to achieve. For this very reason, we used many more microphones than the ones we ended up with.

Choice of Microphones

These are the Mics we carefully selected after multiple playing and listening sessions on the edited samples:

• Schoeps CMC6 with MK4 cardiod capsules matched-pair placed at the player's position
• Royer 121 matched-pair placed inside the open-lid but at a healthy distance from the soundboard to pickup both the direct sound and the reflections from the lid thanks to their figure-8 patterns
• modded Oktava MK-012 spaced matched-pair, placed right above the strings
• pair of matched Neumann M149 mics to pick up the sound from a medium distance

These microphones, by themselves or combined, give you the widest possible gamut of tonal colors you might need from a top-notch concert piano. To preserve tonal balance, we even carefully phase-aligned all of the microphones.

Mixing a-la-carte

One might think that having four different choices and combinations of mics plus the reverb would make finding the perfect balance impossible.

It is not.

This Instrument, we believe, easily opens 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:

• Volume
• Panpot, 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

Features

• 9.12 GB (lossless compressed) library size, 6640 samples
• 4 microphone sets: Schoeps CMC6 MK4s, Royer 121 ribbons, modded Oktava MK-012s and Neumann M149 stereo room set
• 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, SSL and Focusrite preamps fed direct into Apogee converters
• all of the details of the piano recreated through the use of our custom advanced scripting
• recorded at 24 bit / 96 KHz, released at 24 bit / 44.1 KHz
• easy-to-use mixer for extreme sound-mangling