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Double Platinum Rock Piano

A Little History

This historic instrument redefines the term "vintage," having come to life in 1895 at Steinway and Son's New York plant, three years before Scott Joplin composed the Maple Leaf Rag. Unfortunately, little is known about this six foot ten Steinway B before it arrived at a recording studio in LA in 1969. At that time, the studio's owner recognized the rock 'n' roll potential of the instrument and had it thoroughly re-built and customized to sing through virtually any wall of sound a band could conjure up. The hammers were hardened, certain hardware replaced, and a special "box top" was built and mounted on its frame to better isolate it for live ensemble sessions. The result - a rock 'n' roll resurrection.

In '73 Elton John got wind of it and was lured away from Caribou Ranch in Colorado to track many of the piano parts for his Caribou album. Word quickly spread as it played host to a hall-of-fame of musicians, appearing on legendary records from Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and a slew of others.


Since then it has been tweaked and maintained to be the quintessential rock piano, though despite the pampering, its original finish - what's left of it - has never been re-touched. Having been lovingly pummeled by history's best rock musicians, the beast is no longer a furniture piece. Every cigarette burn and whiskey stain is recorded in its ancient lacquer, its fallboard permanently etched by thousands of flailing fingernails. But what is a rock legend without a few wrinkles and scars? What matters is its soul.

The Piano

There are two qualities that distinguish Double Platinum Rock Piano from most concert or studio grand pianos. The most obvious is brightness, derived not from artificial EQ but from the quality of the piano itself - with slightly hardened hammers and other rebuilding and maintenance "secrets" geared toward a high-impact sound. The second main factor is the quickness of the tonal decay. While long, rich sustains are desirable for concertos or combos, in rock or any dense music, the piano should speak loudly, then acquiesce to assume its rightful place in the mix. It's that quality that allows this piano to sit so well in a track, cutting through and blending without dominating or muddying the sound.

The Modulation Wheel

This is one of the most important tools on this disc. The Mod Wheel is used to control how much effect velocity has on your sampler's low pass filter. In the down position, velocity has the most effect, darkening the sound when you play softly.* As you move the wheel upward, the low velocities have progressively less effect on the filter, and at full on, the filter is always wide open regardless of velocity, resulting in a continuously bright sound. The Mod Wheel does not control volume or any other effect.

*The Akai S1000 doesn't support this Mod Wheel routing, so we offer users of S1000s, S2000s and S3000s three different versions of each program, each representing a different velocity to filter scaling.

Velocities

We decided to record the piano at three velocities, not just for optimal expression in the performance, but to capture the bolder nuances of this raucous instrument. In general, the ff (fortissimo) samples were struck quite hard to accommodate the player who feels the need to really smack the keys and wants the sound to "bite back." These brassy samples also work well alone for rock 'n' roll, honky tonk and boogie woogie.

Contrary to a more standard approach, the mf (mezzo forte) samples were performed quite aggressively as well, pulling back just enough to created a round, well-balanced, yet still brazen timbre perfect for rock, pop or fusion. If you find the instruments with ff samples too harsh, then you'll probably enjoy the mf instruments. The p (piano) samples were played softly, though with the filter wide open you'll find they're still quite bright.

Samples

Though we sampled all 88 keys, we did favor certain samples in programming, essentially improving the piano by selecting only the warmest and most resonant tones. Not every key made it to a patch, but if you're brave, we invite you to check out some of the "oddballs" to hear the unique character of this war-horse. You'll find there are several programs which feature different sets of samples providing subtle color variations.

Each sample is available three ways; stereo with no loops, stereo with loops and mono with loops. The intent here is to allow you to choose your program based on memory constraints, number of multi-samples, and decay characteristics. In an ensemble situation for instance, you might consider using the looped samples since their decay is longer than the non-looped samples, and the other instruments will disguise the effect of the loop. The mono samples were mixed from the left and right stereo channels. Though we like to encourage experimentation, we don't recommend using either one or the other stereo channel for mono recording.

Ranges

We've established three different types of range mapping:

  • Full Keyboard

  • Two Way Split

  • Three Way Split*

*Not available in the Akai version.

The two-way split is meant to be used for two-sampler configurations. In your disc directory, they'll be defined as lower half and upper half. You may load one each into two samplers to create larger versions. The three-way splits are divided into low, mid and high regions and have overlapping ranges. They're meant for smaller loads when only a certain portion of the piano is needed. Ranges and abbreviations are listed in the Quick Reference Table.

Program Sizes

We set our sights on four RAM targets; 8 Megabytes (Mb), 16 Mb, 32 Mb and 64 Mb. Depending on your sampler, the 64 Mb versions may be comprised of two 32 Mb programs split at Middle C (C4).

 

From the day they opened their doors in 1994, ILIO has been committed to producing useful, timeless and inspiring sample libraries for musicians. Tapping years of experience in sound design and electronic composition, their knowledge of the quality demands of today's music scene is the driving force behind every title they release.

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