Synthogy is firmly in the latter category. Their Ivory software, which won our Key Buy award in March ’05, starts with concert-level grand pianos that are meticulously regulated. Every key is sampled at up to 12 velocity levels, and there is no looping of samples: The notes stream from a hard drive as you play them, and decay to silence naturally. Synthogy recommends dedicating a FireWire drive to their pianos; a USB drive, especially one attached to a hub, may not be fast enough for the challenge.
We tried Italian Grand, the first expansion pack for Ivory, on two machines. The first was a Pentium 4 PC with a 3GHz processor, which is fast enough, but only 1GB of RAM. This meets Ivory’s minimum requirements, but Synthogy recommends 2GB, which was the amount of RAM in the second machine, an Apple MacBook pro. Both had external FireWire drives for samples. On the 1GB computer, I had to load some of the less memory-intensive presets in order to prevent nasty pops and crackles. On the 2GB machine, tech editor Stephen Fortner played the flagship presets alongside several soft synths in Logic Pro, with lots of sustained notes and Logic’s buffer set at 64 samples, with no problems. So, take Synthogy’s recommendations seriously — the difference between 1GB and 2GB of memory is crucial.
Fortunately, Italian Grand includes versions with 12, 10, eight, six, and four velocity layers. The sample matching is superb: Even with only six layers, I had to listen hard to detect any velocity switching. If you don’t need soft-pedal samples, you can unload them, but I recommend leaving the separate release samples layer loaded, as it adds a lot, in a subliminal way, to the realism. Limiting the number of voices Ivory uses is also an option, as is recording and editing a MIDI sequence using an economy-class preset and then rendering the finished track to disk using the full grand. Installation itself is time-consuming: The Italian Grand comes on five DVDs, occupies more than 18GB of drive space, and requires an hour to install.
Not surprisingly, Italian Grand sounds simply stunning. Using a good, weighted MIDI keyboard, you could record classical music on this piano and no one would ever know — that’s how phenomenal it is. Unlike the other Ivory pianos — a Bösendorfer Imperial 290, German Steinway D, and Yamaha C7 — this one is not identified, but if you’re guessing it might be a Fazioli F-308 (see page 29 of our Mar. ’07 issue), I won’t try to convince you otherwise. Italian Grand requires you to have Ivory 1.5 or later installed, so you’ll already have three great pianos on your hard drive, but this extra option may be very worthwhile. The differences among these pianos are subtle, but I feel the Italian Grand has a little extra depth and warmth.
Fortner, who’s spent his share of time on the real thing, commented, “Fazioli really makes a best-of-all-worlds piano, with the thundering bass and midrange sustain of a Bösendorfer, the subtlety of a Steinway, and if your fingers ask for it, some of the Yamaha sparkle. It’s the piano Débussy and Richard Tee could be perfectly happy sharing on a desert island. Italian Grand captures that incredibly well, and playing it next to the other Ivory pianos gives an accurate picture of the differences between the real ones.” Bottom line? Ivory Italian Grand just begs to be played.
Ivory doesn’t have a lot of sound design frills, but piano-centric basics are covered quite nicely. The excellent-sounding reverb has half a dozen algorithms and four parameters. Low and high shelving EQ is certain to be useful, the chorus perhaps less so. There’s even a sweet-sounding synth pad layer that you can dial in for a pop piano mix.