Ableton Forum

Hi folks - reallyloving Abelton 7 but can anyone recommend me a source for decent quality Rhodes or Piano VSTs? Ideally free but I will pay if needbe. Many thanks, Jayemay.

TruePianos.

Discussion: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... truepianos

the best rhodes emulation is velvet me thinks, but its only for pro tools. At puremagnetic there are some samples of electric pianos, and there is a native instruments plugin called electric pianos or something like that. For piano tascam has got a free vst called Giga I think, I used to use that.

Lounge Lizard is the best Rhodes vst i ever heard.

The Mr. Ray 73 is awesome, and free.
Also the Mr Tramp is a REAL nice wurlitzer.

http://www.genuinesoundware.com/?a=showproduct&b=37

Lounge Lizard is known as ELECTRIC in the Live SUITE, the Abes licensed it. Yes, it's an awesome EP. Physical modelling means great performance and less latency than the typical sampled EPs. Although the presets are pretty heavily racked in some cases eating some CPU.

The Puremagnetik samples are pretty good too.

Pianoteq is my favourite piano VST. Truepianos is good for the price and sounds nice too.

Hey leeds-

How do you feel Pianoteq's Rhodes compares to Lounge Lizard? I'm thinking about buying both. It seems to me that LL is more versatile that Pianoteq's Rhodes, but it lacks the key noises. Pianoteq is wicked-good as a piano plugin, and its Rhodes sure does sound good.

I'm just wondering what your (or anyone else's) take is on that.

Thanks!

the best piano i've heard that doesn't cost enough for an exorcism from the pope himself is Galaxy II...
the best rhodes i've heard that doesn't cost enough for a foreclosed home is Scarbee RSP 73.

Both are awesome. I like the Rhodes sound more, but then again I'm stuck at my piano for a few hours a day

Don't trust the mp3 demos, try the software demo or see if a friend has it.

sheers

I have to confess, I did not know Pianoteq had an EP, will be sure try that soon !

The Piano in Pianoteq is awesome - it might not sound quite as nice as Ivory or Akoustik Piano, but it sounds great and is more playable and has all the extra tweaks and pedal dampening, changing string length and so on. For quick runs, it's the business.

+1 for pianoteq

this guy did a real good job of sampling his own and made a soundfont of it:

http://learjeff.net/sf/sf.html

you can dump it into sampler. put an amp simulator or other effects on it and that could be enough for certain applications.

I own pianoteq and love it.

I have tried other sample based piano emulations but to me they sound like a recording of an instrument rather than a live instrument (since that's what they are). They tend to sound more "familiar" in the mix though, since they are recordings of real instruments. However, when practicing or performing (which is when I'm most critical), pianoteq comes closest to fooling me into thinking I'm playing a real instrument. Not only the sound, but the feel of it, using a 88 key weighted keyboard.

They just released version 3 which offers a rhodes and wurlitzer emulations (for extra $). I haven't bought them since I find the Logic plugins suffice in this regard, but the demos sound pretty great. The new version also includes a "mic positioning" option-- maybe this will help out in the recording department, though I haven't experimented with it much...

Ah, sorry, I just noticed the original poster was looking for something free... which pianoteq is not.

I remember there was an awesome free plugin called mda epiano. Used to use that shit on everything...

mr ray for electric

yamaha c7 samples are free and really good... http://sonart.cc/shop/product_info.php?products_id=210

I use NI's Elektrik and Akoustik pianos. Both are STAGGERINGLY good.

I think you can still get their 'Komplete Classics' collection for about £160 from DV247.com.