Whereas most piano plug-ins offer one piano, Ivory gives you three. All 88 notes of a Yamaha C7 and Hamburg Steinway D have been sampled individually at as many as eight different velocity levels. Soft pedaled versions of each key at multiple velocities are included, which you can engage by sending MIDI CC#67 via a pedal. Release samples for multiple levels of velocity and length of note are included, too; these are chosen by an algorithm that tracks your playing for velocity and duration. Same goes for a Bösendorfer 290, but for all 97 notes.
Lotta pianos, lotta samples. The Bösendorfer alone is made up of 12GB. Ivory streams its samples from a hard drive, so one of th e biggest factors in its performance is tthe speed of your hard drive. Avoid using your system drive or the drive you record audio to; Synthogy recommends setting up a FireWire RAID array with Apple RAID, which is easy to do. There are smaller versions of the main three presets, which can help out slower processors.
You’re not stuck with the tone that’s recorded into the samples, either. Ivory has more piano-centric tone control than any other virtual piano. You can read the list of controls in the Gory Details on page 92, but here are some of the remarkable things you can accomplish by tweaking them. You can fix the apparent location of your virtual “microphone” by adjusting sustain resonance, key noise, stereo spread, and stereo perspective; make the mic seem like it’s almost on the strings at the pinblock or suspended above the tail. You can emulate the sound of that great piano you have in your mind’s ear. Some players feel that key thunk is an essential element in a realistic piano feel, others seem to filter it out of their memories and want less of it in their tracks. Easily done. You can read about additional possibilities on page 88 and page 92.
Ivory’s tuning and transposition controls are on the main control pane, which is way more convenient than having to use your host software’s transposition. You can set the tuning in 0.5 Hz increments from A=420 up to 460; that’s just a couple Hz shy of the standard historical pitch levels of 415 (baroque) and 466 (renaissance). Not that anyone would play a modern piano in a historical setting; it’d be nice to dial it in easily in order to help a student ensemble learn to tune to those pitches. As it is, you have to crank the fine tuning a few cents to reach those pitches. Switch between stretch and equal tempered tuning? Just click the toggle switch. Cool.
Another feature that helps you dial in the kind of performance you want: user-adjustable velocity curves. This lets you set Ivory so that it matches the way you play on your MIDI controller. You can see the curve on a clearly-labeled graph, select from preset curves, or customize these by specifying maximum and minimum levels and degree of “hardness.” This can go a long way towards making Ivory the “just right” piano for you, and it’s awesome to have it this control on hand in the plug-in itself.
Effects include a two-band shelving EQ, seven “rooms” of reverb with just the right kind of controls, and a remarkably robust chorus. Though it’s a sound and not an effect, I’ll mention the synth pad sounds that you can activate and layer with the pianos. Not my thing, but it gives you a variety of classic layering options.
Three cool pianos at this price would be enough. To be able to tweak the sound with such musically-minded controls is huge.
In Use
Installation took over two hours, but getting Ivory authorized took mere seconds. I ran Ivory on two systems, a Mac G4 and a G5, the specs and software of which you can read about in Gory Details. I loaded in the massive Bösendorfer patch and fired off scales and arpeggios spanning the keyboard. And I got a bunch of clicks and stutters. After increasing the buffer for my Pro Tools and MOTU audio interfaces and using Ivory’s own buffer selections and polyphony settings, I avoided the artifacts and could play without noticeable latency.
Once there, was I impressed. The three main pianos have their own character and sonic signatures. The Bösendorfer has a rich warm sound, the Steinway a brilliant color, and the Yamaha is as clear as a bell. In the lower register, you can practically feel the bass notes purr. With eight layers of multisamples, I could play crescendos that seemed as smooth as on a real piano. I love the piano-oriented controls: Thick chords could be clear, or a little more blended with the help of a soundboard change. With the resonance control, stereo width, and dynamic range, you can really dial in a particular piano sound you have in mind, from a performer with their head in the strings of their beloved instrument to a producer who has a particular mic placement they like, and to a jazz piano fan who favors the piano sounds on particular labels from particular eras. I threw everything at it, and it always sounded fantastic. The more RAM-efficient programs sounded good, too.
I did run into a snag when I tried to freeze a track in Logic 7: The release samples and reverb seemed not to get recorded, yielding quite an ugly sound. All my other keyboard plugs freeze fine in Logic, and the same process in Digital Performer went just fine.
Conclusions
There are many virtual pianos on the market now, but in my opinion, Ivory sounds the best, and is the most musical. The piano-specific sound control is unlike any other virtual instrument. You may have to finesse your interface settings and switch hard drives to get optimal performance. I might hesitate to depend on Ivory to do a live piano recital. But I wouldn’t hesitate to use a lighter preset to play with a band, and I haven’t found the piano piece yet that doesn’t sound great on playback. Simply put, Ivory is at the head of the class, and a Key Buy.