The Grand VST from Steinberg


The Grand VST from Steinberg
by Jack Conrad
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The darkest day of my life (so to speak) was the day I had to give up the rental baby grand piano that took up half my living room. I gave up the majesty, the beauty and the room hogging dimensions of one of the finest sounding instruments man has ever invented--all to pursue the latest utopian "band-in-a-box" vision. Never mind I was spending less time writing and playing and more time pulling my hair out over one computer quandary after another. Well, the good news is that things have come full circle.

Steinberg's The Grand VST brings one of the best sounding pianos I've ever heard back into my life and it fits right into any computer running a VST 2.0 host application. Not a digital piano or samples from a ROM, The Grand uses Steinberg's HALion technology to "stream" grand piano samples directly from your hard disk. Sound design partner Wizoo has come up with over one gigabyte of excellent acoustic grand piano samples that include all dynamics, damper and hammer actions and sustain and sostenuto pedals. Samples are separated from room ambience putting you in complete control of the piano and ambience mix.

The edit panel's three sections are Keyboard Settings, Sound and Global. You can specify the type of controller (weighted or not... it's weird for me to play it from my non-weighted MIDI keyboard), the velocity curve and store any custom settings. Sound Character has a choice of natural, soft, bright and hard as well as the ambience and master volume controls. The Global section with its True Sustain Resonance, True String Release and True Hammer Release are just brilliant. These features, in my opinion, make it sound more like the real thing than anything else on the market. There are adjustments for Quality and Memory usage and two choices of tuning, Well-tempered and Concert Grand scale.

The minimum system requirements for PCs are: P-II, 400 mHz, 256MB RAM (but get 512), 1.3 GB of free disk space, Win 9x, Me or 2000, Cubase VST 5.0 or higher/Nuendo or other VST 2.0 host application and a decent ASIO soundcard. You could get by with the Sound Blaster but the latency would drive you mad! For Macs: G3/500MHz, Mac OS 9.x and the same RAM and disk space.

The Grand sells for $299 MSRP and Steinberg North America is at 9200 Eton Ave., Chatsworth, CA 91311. Phone 818-678-5100 or visit www.us.steinberg.net

Jack Conrad, bass-playing former touring member of The Doors and The Beach Boys bands, ex-studio musician and co-writer of three top ten hits with cuts by The Babys, Heart and Three Dog Night.

Edited by: Barry Rudolph

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