Garritan Abbey Road Studios CFX Concert Grand

I'm going to start this review by saying my favorite piano for a while now has been Keyscape. The piano in Keyscape is just amazing, so check it out if you haven't yet. But I also wanted to try Garritan since everyone said it was one of the best. I went for it, and I've been playing the Garritan for about a month now. I have to say, I have grown quite fond of it.At first impression, I wasn't fully impressed. It's a beautiful piano, yes. The room has a lovely reverb. But it still didn't quite measure up to what I was accustomed to with Keyscape. The Garritan piano initially felt both more distant and more brash/cutting. I like the warm, sweet, intimate tone of Keyscape. But I wasn't ready to give up. I spent some time tweaking, and what I've been finding is that the Garritan piano is remarkably adjustable. This, it turns out, is a huge strength.The Garritan piano was recorded with many different mic perspectives. There are at least 6 stereo mic setups involved in this recording, and maybe more. There are also a lot of presets, and they cover a wide range of styles and tonality. If you take some time working through the different presets and the mic positions, you are sure to find something you like.I found there were three magical adjustments that made all the difference for me. One is a control called Saturation. I don't know what this is doing exactly, but cranking up the saturation about halfway just makes the sound really big and full. Another control that I found very useful is the Timbre. The basic piano sound is a little brighter than I like, so turning the timbre down a little bit really helps to deepen the sound of the piano. The third control, and probably the most important, is the velocity curve. The velocity curve is completely adjustable, and can be shaped however you to make it. This is very useful. I have adjusted my velocity curve to give the piano a softer, sweeter tone, and this makes all the difference. Other piano software instruments have velocity curve settings too, but they are not as adjustable as this one. Garritan for the win.It's a bit surprising that they included studio reverbs. Part of the marketing of this instrument is that they recorded the piano in a wonderful room which has its own beautiful reverb, making the need for additional reverb seem superfluous. But actually, I like this choice. Because the piano has both close mics and room mics, you can mute the room mics and get a dry sound from the close mics, and then add a studio reverb to get a different tone. Or if you mix in room mics and some studio reverb, you can get a huge, rich sound. The variety of tone you can access here is remarkable.Some people commented that the piano has too much reverb. You can definitely get a more dry sound if you want it. But I'm finding that I like the space - the big, open sound. I have Ivory as well, and the Garritan definitely sounds more open and rich.I was able to tweak Garritan to get a sound very similar to Keyscape with the Cinematic preset, which is amazing because Keyscape is pure magic. The fact that Garritan can get there is incredible. I've been finding that I have a preference for playing the Garritan piano. It's my new favorite. I have to say the Garritan engineers have done an amazing job creating this instrument.I didn't have a totally smooth experience installing this. I bought the boxed version, which comes on a USB drive. When I first tried to install it, I got an error that a file was corrupted, and the install failed. But I contacted support, and they helped me right away, and after doing some troubleshooting with me, they provided me with a special download link to download a whole new copy of the software. I downloaded it, all 15 GB, and the install went perfectly this way. Apparently I got a bad USB stick. But they took care of it for me. So I'm a happy customer.One thing that I found curious is that one or more of the notes have some noises in the sustain tails. Occasionally, as I'm playing, I hear something that sounds like someone shuffling or bumping something quietly in the room. It doesn't bother me, but it is interesting. I can't make it do that sound on purpose, but it happens occasionally as I'm playing, so it must be only a certain velocity level or something.When first loading up the piano, or when switching mic positions, a sample set has to load into memory before you can play anything. This is different from some other instruments that I've used, where the sounds are available instantly. For example, Keyscape makes a preview available instantly, so you can play right away, but it continues loading the full samples in the background. Garritan makes you wait while it loads the samples. Fortunately it only takes a few seconds, but still worth noting.I am using the Garritan piano on a late 2013 Macbook Pro, which has a quad core processor and an SSD drive. I am using Mainstage software to run the plugin. I don't know how this instrument would perform on a different type of computer (especially a Windows PC), but it runs great on the Mac.The Garritan CFX Concert Grand is definitely better than other piano software instruments. Bigger and richer than Ivory. More body and fullness than Alicia's Keys, and also more precisely tuned. More organic sounding than Addictive Keys. Beautiful sound.I am very pleased with the Garritan CFX Concert Grand. 5 stars, absolutely.

This bring back life to my old recorded midi, I have use many piano sample such as ivory, white grand, Galaxy Steinway, alicias key, This is the one make you feel that you are playing a real instrument and may enlarge your creative. And I am just using a crappy $150 88 keys at this moment. However the site need to improve, Remember provide an email when you sign up on makemusic site otherwise you can't generate your product key and write to support. I ended up contact garritan on sns to resolve the problem.

Totally love this. The quality and flexibility are incredibleI used to use Ivory … but it didn't get along well with Windows 10.Plenty of options … You have to spend a bit of time tweaking the sound.I like a dry sound (like a piano in the room).

I've tried almost every piano VST (Literally) and this is just on another level. Enough said.

This is the best piano VST and actually the best approximation to a real instrument among all available digital options. However there's one big problem you have to deal with: you need to provide a proper sound output. It's very difficult to reproduce piano sound correctly without building an actual acoustic instrument. Actually, if your sound system properly reproduces piano sound, it almost guarantees excellent reproduction of everything else. Chances are high that your existing bookshelf/monitor speakers or headphones simply won't work well with CFX Concert Grand. This will result in the piano sound being somewhat unnatural. Here's what you should know:1. Only certain models of headphones are suitable for this applications. The cheapest option I am aware of is Sennheiser HD600. Please note, you are not looking for something that sounds enjoyable, you are looking for something that reproduces sound extremely accurately. Important: for headphones you should use "player" perspective (a special set of samples provided in the full version of the software), since player perspective was the only perspective recored using the binaural method.2. You may need to buy a good external DAC or an audio interface. However, if you own a Mac, you are probably good to go. DACs used in Apple hardware are typically on par or superior to the majority of external DACs. Please note, that adding an external DAC may result in introducing an additional latency.3. Room configuration/materials/objects make a huge contribution to the sound produced by speakers. I tested different semi-pro monitor speakers with near-flat frequency responses, including some expensive ones, like Yamaha HS8 or Focal Alpha 50. In an untreated room piano sound was not natural at all and bass/treble room adjustment did not help. Keep in mind that flat frequency response is not everything you need. In a perfectly treated room (which does not exist!) perfectly "flat" speakers may still reproduce sound of piano incorrectly. Measured frequency response is not the only parameter. There are some others. For example, you need to guarantee a fast transient response. Due to a faster transient response JBL LSR 305/306/308 mkII monitor speakers in some situations may work better than more expensive Yamaha monitors.4. If each of your speakers has more than one driver (i.e., 2-way, 3-way, etc), you may face cross-over problems, which can be pretty noticeable with piano sound.5. Surprisingly, you can fix a lot of sound problems (disclaimer: not all) using a cheap multi-band graphic equalizer. Actually, you need to have a good hardware/software equalizer in the first place unless you want to invest a couple of thousands dollars into room treatment (ideally you should build a new room). Having good speakers is secondary. Keep in mind: the parametric equalizer provided in Garritan software is almost useless for this application. Here's my story. I have a Clavinova digital piano. It has a pretty decent sound system (6 speakers with independent amplification) and there's a possibility to connect the piano to a non-amplified external audio source. Sounds like a win, right? Unfortunately, when I tried to connect my laptop with the Garritan software to the piano the sound was simply awful. This is because the speakers were tuned to properly reproduce sound samples of a specific digital instrument (Clavinova). Monitor speakers, although they did not sound fully natural and typically had annoying hiss and other unpleasant artifacts, at that point seemed like a way better option. Nevertheless, I went a different path and I bought a 2-channel 31-band 1/3 octave graphic equalizer (<100$). It took me a week to adjust the settings properly, but the result was amazing. The speaker system of my digital piano now sounds like a high-end audio system in a very well treated room. And, what is more important, the piano sound is finally right.6. Many people think that to reproduce piano sound you necessarily need a subwoofer. The argumentation is minimal piano note frequency = 27.5Hz (or 16.3Hz for some Bosendorfers) and 3"-8" speakers (the most popular size) simply can't reproduce these frequencies properly. The truth is a note spectrum is full of various harmonics. If one of them is attenuated, it does not mean the note will sound very badly. I made experiments completely cutting all frequencies below 100Hz and the piano still sounded like a piano, although the sound was not completely perfect of course. So a subwoofer is not a must. Good subwoofers are huge BTW. However, if you are a perfectionist, you should definitely buy one.

Best Software piano yet

Great product! Great sounds. Large library but worth it.