The idea behind Pianoverse is to start with a huge library of expertly sampled pianos and then build around that an expanse of tools that will let you craft the perfect piano sound for any situation. Whether you are after the spectacular sound of a concert grand in a concert hall, or something cinematic that fits a soundtrack, a smokey jazz club vibe set on another planet or some playful stabs in your latest house track, Pianoverse will do it all.

Pianoverse features a growing collection of classic instruments meticulously captured with robot-assisted sampling. This has enabled IK to go to levels of dynamic detail never heard before. Currently, there are eight pianos available which include the Yamaha YF3 Concert Grand and the Y5 Royal Upright, Bösendorfer 280 Vienna Concert and 200, and a Steinway & Sons New York D-274 and Hamburg D-274, a Fazioli F278 and a Koch & Korselt Upright. Each instrument takes up about 25GB of sampled data.

In the main Piano page you can adjust the playing sensitivity, velocity curves, an overview of the space and effects being applied along with transposition, tuning and even the position of the lid. In the Space page you can set your piano in a range of environments. There’s a wide choice of locations including all the usual suspects such as rooms, concert halls and cathedrals, but then it gets interesting with car parks, forests, underground, icebergs and the planet Mars. IK’s reverb engine moves and adjusts to give you a sense of exactly where you believe it to be.

Then you have the mixing and effects section where you can set exactly how you want your piano miked up so you can control every aspect of the sound you’re hearing. The effects are of studio production quality giving you some fun ways to process the sound. It leans into lots of tape saturation, impulse bending and opportunities to be really creative without having to look outside the plugin.

There are more pianos to come which you can either build into a collection or simply choose the one that most appeals and go with that. I definitely appreciate how that generates different price points so you don’t ever feel you’re paying for something you won’t use.

Pros & Cons

• Amazingly detailed sampling aided by robots
• Choice of fantastic pianos
• Extreme levels of dynamics
• Astonishing environments
• Incredibly versatile
• Can take up a lot of space
• Can get expensive the more pianos you want

Street Price: $129.99 per piano or a subscription of $14.99 a month for everything
IK Multimedia Pianoverse

Garritan takes on a Yamaha CFX Concert Grand Piano but it’s not just any old piano sitting around somewhere, this is the Yamaha CFX that sits in the famous Abbey Road Studio A in London. Some of the world’s finest musicians have sat on that stool and tinkled on those ivories.

More importantly, for this instrument is that some of the “world’s best Engineers” helped set up some of the “world’s greatest microphones” and equipment to enable the capture of this stunning instrument.

Studio One is a huge space that can accommodate 110 piece orchestras. It has a warm and clear sound, taking full advantage of the room’s 2.3 seconds reverb time. It has hosted everything from the London Symphony Orchestra to The Beatles’ famous live performance of “All You Need Is Love.”

The Yamaha CFX was hand-built in 1991 by a small team of experienced and skilled craftsmen. It’s a refined and expressive instrument with enough tonal presence to be heard over an entire orchestra.

The microphone placements for the recordings formed three discrete perspectives. They call these “Classic” for the most natural tone, Contemporary to emphasize the brightness and attack, and then Player offers the experience of sitting on the stool. From those recordings, various presets have been created which reflect further audio processing to create a sound for many different occasions.

Pros & Cons

• Top class Yamaha CFX piano
• World class recording environment
• High end equipment used throughout and it shows
• Multiple perspectives and presets
• Requires a multi-core processor and a fast drive with 133GB free for a full installation.
• Very specifically this piano which may not be for everyone.

Street Price: $199.95
Garritan Abbey Road CFX Concert Grand

Synthogy has been sampling pianos for a very long time. This latest release features two very different pianos, the Steinway B Grand Piano and the Bosendorfer 225 Grand Piano. The Steinway sits in the Power Station New England in Waterford and the Bosendorfer resides in the Firehouse Recording Studios in Pasadena California. Both were recorded with all the expertise that Synthogy has built up over the past decades.

For these sorts of instruments, the location was key. The Power House NE was modeled on the famous Power Station/Avatar space in New York and this recording was engineered by Mark Donahue. The Firehouse is a historic studio space and engineered by Tony Sheppard. Both pianos were recorded in exacting detail with multiple microphone setups and perspectives.

These instruments are built in the new Ivory 2.5 sound engine using 112GB of core library. Each note is sampled to 24 layers of velocity with multiple levels of soft pedal and release samples triggered by velocity and duration. They even included the pedal noise.

For processing, they use a custom Soundboard Emulation DSP, digital effects and Harmonic Resonance Modeling for a truly sympathetic string resonance.

Pros & Cons

• They’ve done this before
• Two different pianos with different characters
• A lot of user control over tone and perspective
• Interface a little dated
• Very specific pianos that won’t suit everyone
• No alternative mic perspectives

Street Price: $299
Synthogy Ivory II Studio Grands

Keyscape is an enormous collection of keyboards. Where other VST Pianos focus exclusively on a single instrument Keyscape takes in 36 models of keyboard instrument. Many of them are electric and eclectic but there’s a wonderful Grand Piano, a pair of uprights, a Butterfly Piano, and 3 Toy Pianos. But we’ll just focus on the Grand piano.

The LA Custom C& Grand Piano is a unique instrument owned by LA piano technician Jim Wilson. It has some special modifications taking “Blue Point” hammers and very rare felt that contribute to the very wide tonal spectrum. It has an amazing dynamic range and color palette.

Spectrasonics spent a year perfecting this instrument and modeled everything from the subtleties of pedal noise to the intricate interaction of the release overtones.

Keyscape features innovative harmonic controls including “Color Shift” adjustments and “Character” control that enable a wide range of piano sounds to emerge from the same instrument. You can also match the instrument to the velocity curve of your MIDI controller making the playing experience far more realistic.

You probably wouldn’t buy Keyscape just for the Grand Piano but this is an inspiring piece of work that contains a wealth of keyboard sounds and possibilities.

Pros & Cons

• Huge range of sounds from rate and beautiful instruments
• Innovative character and color modeling
• Duo mode where you can combine two instruments
• Might be a lot more than you need

Street Price: $399
Spectrasonics Keyscape

When people talk about virtual pianos, Pianoteq is invariably the first one that comes to mind. It’s the daddy of Piano emulations. It’s won more awards than any other virtual piano and is probably the deepest, widest and most beautiful.

The key to all this is that it doesn’t use samples – Pianoteq uses physical modeling. A physical model is a computer emulation of every part of a piano’s physical being. This enables software to change and emulate every possible combination, every nuance, every resonant string, or mechanical noise. It’s all in there and takes up next to no space on your hard drive.

The sound of Pianoteq is so good that it is the only software approved by Steinway & Sons. It has uniquely adjustable physical attributes like unison width, octave stretching, hammer hardness, soundboard, string length, sympathetic resonance, and duplex scale resonance.

It does have layers of velocity samples it can use the full range of 127 MIDI velocities. You can adjust the lid position, emulated mic positions, instrument condition and there are 10 types of pedal you can swap in. There’s polyphonic aftertouch, convolution reverbs, effects, EQ and keyboard calibration.

Whatever you set, however you configure it, Pianoteq will construct the sound in real-time as you play in response to how you play. Piantoeq now covers a wide variety of pianos that you can select and buy and comes in three versions.

Pianoteq Stage removes all the configuration elements and offers you the phenomenal sound engine and 2 instrument packs. Pianoteq Standard enables a bunch of powerful tools including mic placement and lets you choose 3 instrument packs. Pianoteq Pro opens up everything to you and comes with 4 instrument packs.

Pros & Cons

• Simply the most versatile piano available
• Huge sound design potential
• Very small install footprint
• Wide variety of instruments
• Gets pricey with additional instruments

Street Price:
• Pianoteq Stage $129
• Pianoteq Standard $249
• Pianoteq Pro $369
Modartt Pianoteq

The Vienna Symphonic Library is world-renowned for its authentic splendor and nuanced sound quality. When it came to creating a virtual piano they brought the full weight of their expertise to bear on it.

The instrument in question was the Bösendorfer Imperial 290-755 and they spent 2 months sampling it. And we’re not talking about setting up a few microphones and stitching together a virtual instrument. They recorded 1,200 samples for every key. That’s an unimaginable amount of data.

It was meticulously recorded in pedal-up and pedal-down in up to 100 velocities, sympathetic resonances, and multiple releases. It’s safe to say that the Vienna Imperial is the most realistic sampled piano ever captured and fills 69GB of space.

Despite the complexity of the library, the interface is simple and intuitive where you can load the piano and play. Or if you want to get into the details of the sound and design your own unique take on the Bösendorfer Imperial 290-755, then you can do that, too.

Pros & Cons

• Incredible detail
• Multiple levels of sampling
• Sounds perfect
• Uses a huge amount of drive space
• Pricey

Street Price: $540
Vienna Imperial

Another Steinway D captured into a simpler 11GB of sampled instrument. What E-Instruments do well is the straightforward, uncluttered approach to making excellent sounding instruments that are easy to use and work well in any environment. It works within the Native Instruments Kontakt engine and takes advantage of the modulation and animation possibilities.

You start with a fabulous Grand Piano sound with multiple microphone positions and with the lid off as well as up. That resulted in two quite distinctive characters which they’ve called the Concert and the Studio versions.

The Concert version is bright and lively whereas the Studio is softer and better able to melt into a mix. Then they built in the ability to transform the sound with “Pentamorph” which is like a macro that shifts various characteristics to push it into different tonal areas.

The Animator section is designed to add harmony and phrasing around your playing which has the ability to inspire the less able players. There are over 400 flexible piano phrases that you can tweak and control the intensity of. Alongside is a Smart Chord tool which can add chord changes and arpeggiations to your notes.

Session Keys Grand S is ideal for the less advanced player and brings in tools that’ll improve the way you use a piano in your music.

Pros & Cons

• Two great sounding piano tones
• Easy tonal changes on a single control
• Built in chords and phrases
• Advanced players wouldn’t need the Animator side
• Not enough control for serious sound design

Street Price: $99
E-instruments Session Keys Grand S

A more unique and specific instrument, the Ravenscroft 275 approaches the sampling level of the Vienna Imperial but aims for character and customization over simple authenticity.

Within the interface, you have full control over the mixing of four microphones placed for the detailed sampling of this instrument. All the multiple layers are pulled together via a detail scripting engine to ensure that what you hear follows the character and quirkiness of the real-life piano.

It has incredibly detailed samples of hammer attacks, muted strikes, staccato release trails, resonance, and pedal noises.

You have lots of control over the tuning, the velocity curves, the amount of noise and expression given to every note and it’s an absolute joy to play.

Pros & Cons

• Detailed sampling of sound and noise
• Deep level of control over the character
• Sounds unique
• It’s just the one instrument

Street Price: $199
VI Labs Ravenscroft 275