If I had to narrow it down to two products that changed the world with regard to digital instruments sounding like a grand piano, I’d pick the Kurzweil K250 and Synthogy Ivory. Of course, when you’re king of the hill, everyone wants to knock you off, as evidenced by all the software pianos that have hit the scene since we first reviewed Ivory in March 2005. Sound designer Joe Ierardi is known for taking the time to get things right rather than rushing to market, and after much anticipation, Ivory II has arrived to grant the wishes of many a power user. Is it still the king? Let’s find out.

What’s New

More velocity layers. The “German Concert D” (Steinway) keyset now has up to 18 velocity layers; the “Imperial” (Bösendorfer) and “Studio 7ft” (Yamaha) max out at 16. That’s blissful overkill for pop, but a classical virtuoso could play Ivory II solo with absolutely no fear of even the most critical listeners hearing any telltales that it’s not a real concert grand. Even when I downsized to the six-layer keysets (the “litest” keysets have four layers, and there are several intermediate choices), I couldn’t discern any velocity or key zone points where one sample set clearly replaced another.

Modeled resonance. At least three kinds of resonance can happen inside a real piano, all consisting of vibrations that are secondary to, but caused by, the notes you play. Sustain resonance occurs when the damper pedal is pressed, freeing any and all strings to vibrate. Sympathetic resonance happens if you’re holding some keys and strike new ones. Finally, the soundboard itself may resonate to certain notes. We hear all this as a subtle and usually pleasant harmonic backdrop.

Ivory II adds sympathetic resonance to the sustain resonance and soundboard choices of Ivory 1.x. What’s more compelling is how Synthogy does it. Not satisfied with mixing in samples of strings ringing out, they precisely modeled the physics of which vibrations cause which. So, you don’t hear merely the correct notes singing in sympathy, but the correct harmonics of those notes. The result is the most realistic and musical emulation we’ve ever heard of the complex acoustical world beneath the piano lid. Of course, you can adjust it to taste.

Synth keyset. For non-cheesy ballad piano, I’ve often reached for Ivory’s pads/strings layer rather than calling up another soft synth. You can now octave-shift it relative to the piano, and decay and release knobs add useful envelope sculpting.

Other new features. Five lid position choices include “short stick” and the lid closed with the front flap open. Timbre Shift transposes MIDI and pitch-shifts audio in opposite directions to change the tone without changing the pitch, and ranges from subtle to bizarre. Finally, the midrange of the three-band EQ now has a sweepable center frequency with variable bandwidth.

Session Page

Ivory’s Session settings have expanded to the point where they now get their own page. As before, you can limit disk demands by setting a polyphony ceiling of up to 160 notes. Even at the most conservative 32 notes, whatever voice robbing occurs is the least detectible I’ve ever (not) heard. The toggle for the new half-pedaling support is here—be sure your sustain pedal and whatever jack you plug it into support continuous MIDI data. You can also auto-calibrate the touch curve by striking soft and hard notes on your MIDI keyboard, and set a velocity threshold below which pressing a key makes no sound, which happens on real grands but usually not on digital pianos.

Tuning, transposition, and touch curve controls, as well as half-pedaling support and user-adjustable
polyphony, are found on Ivory's new Session page.

In Play

We often call this section “In Use,” but that doesn’t convey how easy it is to lose yourself in playing Ivory II, sometimes for hours. Installation was smooth, but with 77GB of samples spread over 11 DVDs, a bit time-consuming. The first installer you run insists on putting the Ivory program on your system drive, but then it launches a second installer that puts the sample library wherever you want. It found my old “Ivory Items” folder automatically, and gave accurate time remaining for each DVD.

My favorite piano of the three on offer is still the Steinway. In all three, an audible improvement is that you can coax more dynamic and harmonic variation out of the bottom half of your playing velocity. Piano keysets whose names end in “II” use alternate velocity switch points to accentuate this.

Ivory II is surprisingly efficient. My studio computer is no slouch, but hardly today’s biggest or baddest: a first-generation quad-core Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM and separate internal drives for the system, samples, and audio tracking. With polyphony set to 160 voices on the 18-layer Steinway, release samples on, and my Logic buffer set to a nail-biting 64 samples, I had to hold the sustain pedal and attack my keyboard like Animal from the Muppets to produce an audible glitch. To play Ivory alongside ten audio tracks and three soft synths, all I had to do was raise the buffer to 128.

Capping polyphony at 100 voices and going to 12 velocity layers gave me worry-free play of Ivory II on my laptop, an early MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and the samples on an external FireWire 800 drive. For standing up and playing tunes people dance to, you could go with even fewer layers and still get detail and presence that’d make the “bank A, program 1” piano in any ROMpler run for cover.

Conclusions

Superb. Stellar. Excellent. Outstanding. Best in class. Pick a superlative, and it won’t adequately convey how real Ivory II sounds, nor how immersed in the music you’ll feel when playing it. If you do a lot of productions that call for piano, I could see wanting additional plug-in colors on your palette; if you just need the occasional rock piano, I could see going less expensive. But if you want one software piano that can cover any musical genre, is equally facile onstage or in the studio, and makes zero sonic compromises, Ivory II is the platinum standard. Long live the king!

Specifications

PROS Software grand pianos don’t get any better. Resonance modeling is incredibly realistic. Surprisingly CPU- and disk-efficient. Lite presets retain much of the detail of full-layer versions.

CONS Long install time.

CONCEPT Software virtual piano combining sampling and modeling.
MAX. VELOCITY LAYERS 18.
POLYPHONY Up to 160 voices.
FORMATS Mac or PC. AU, RTAS, VST, and standalone.

PRICE List: $349
Approx. street: $320
Upgrade for registered Ivory 1.x users: $89

synthogy.com