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.
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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:
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Full Keyboard
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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).
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