What I like about these uprights is that they sound exactly as they should do, but the higher register does sometimes feel a little percussive, particularly with the employment of the ribbon mic on the Upright Grand instrument. The Grand Upright offers the user the helpful additional mic’ing, with the ribbon adding a fair degree of mid-register body to the signal. At the more usual end of the spectrum, the German upright (Seiler), and the Grand Upright (Steinway), are both beautifully sonorous, being darker than their grand counterparts, and more generic. Moving on to the next category and we have an extensive collection of uprights, with six very different offerings. The general Hybrid colour is fairly bright, presumably from the Yamaha quotient, so the ability to dial in the ribbon-mic signal darkens the overall colour beautifully and naturally, and makes me wish I had this component available throughout the library. This highlights a slight bugbear, as the Hybrid Grand is the only grand piano which offers additional mic signals, which I find to be unbelievably helpful. Crisp and brightĮach grand has its own distinct character, with the Fazioli being another informed highlight, while the Hybrid piano is akin to Frankenstein’s monster in pianistic form! Comprised of components from Steinway, Yamaha and Bösendorfer, the Hybrid results in a crisp and bright timbre which can be coloured further through additional microphones, which can be faded in and out at will. There’s even the inclusion of an impulse-response element, although I do find the chosen setting on this effect curiously difficult to read it’s almost as though UVI has engineered it to mimic a hardware unit where the display is failing! Authentic touch, possibly, but I keep squinting to see what it’s doing, until I click on the menu, where I’m treated to a more stark and readable drop-down. Delving deeper reveals a healthy barrage of effects on the FX page, with a useful contingent of reverbs, delay and modulation devices. There are eight preset patches for each piano, with uniform characteristics throughout, but all largely relying on the FX bussing.Īpart from more common dry and reverberant patches, other presets such as the Radio FX patch modulate the tuning, with a nod toward the phasing of an AM radio. This pairing of pianos alone could be considered enough to cover most pianistic eventualities, but the patching unravels with a healthy smattering of settings for each. There is a beautiful depth to this sample, particularly in the lower register, where it sounds earthy and sonorous, while the Yamaha C7 sample sounds bright and crisp. Experience tells me that the Steinway always sounds stunning in a more soloist capacity, and certainly there are no complaints on that front. They are all classics in their own right, with user selection largely dictated by the choice of placement within a track. These vary from the classic Steinway Model D and Yamaha C7, through to the beautiful Fazioli F278. It’s very easy to be drawn straight to the first category of pianos, offering five different flavours of grand. In either case, the playback functionality remains the same, with the Workstation environment offering a particularly uncluttered visual. This package fits into the established UVI eco-system, allowing users to load directly into the Falcon soft synth, or use within its free Workstation player.
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