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Signature Grand | Piano Library For Kontakt $49


Simeon Amburgey

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I watched live. Nice piano, but dang there's just too many great pianos out now. I want something I could dig  better than the Grandeur. I should demo Pianoteq. This piano you reviewed is $49? Do you think it as good or better than Noir or anything else? 

Hey man, do you take requests? If so it'd be cool if you played some of The Young and the Restless in one of these videos. That's the riff I use lately to help guage if I like a piano or not lol

Edited by Christian Jones
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@Christian Jones, let me say that this piano was recorded in the same hall as the Spitfire Hans Zimmer grand Using the same piano. This really impressed me that this piano just sounds so good and was playable, equivalent to a $300 library.

This is based on a Steinway which has that particular sound as well as the spaciousness of how they recorded and scripted the library.

I will have to brush up on my soap opera themes, 🤓

Thanks for watching!

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  • 1 month later...

Hey @Simeon Amburgey I was wondering if you get distortion on some of these piano patches. Like under the Film presets section, the 00 DEFAULT FILM preset sounds fine, but the very next preset 01 LA Beauty has a lot of distortion when played at full velocity. I have 16gb of ram and an RME UFX II set at 128 samples w/ ASIO driver selected in Kontakt 5 standalone, and the audio is not clipping so it's hard to tell why it's happening. Not all patches do it either but many do. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I'm just "playing" the keys with the mouse right now, just clicking the keys to test the piano while I wait for a MIDI controller to arrive. With the mouse, when you click high up on the keys the velocity is softer and as you click down the length of the keys the velocity gets harder and that's when I'm getting the distortion. Was just wondering if that happens on your end too as I'm wondering if it's something on my end or something wrong w/ the library. I feel like you certainly would've caught it though so it's weird.

Now that I've loaded this piano in Kontakt 5 within cakewalk I'm finding that it's really not stable on there and is crashing Cakewalk partialy - I have to remove the Kontakt instance that held the Simple Sam piano library and then things are fine. The vender has been unresponsive from the start so I'll probably just handle this through a paypal but dang, I'm looking hard and I can't see how it's my system that's the issue as every other NI piano library (all I have for piano) works fine.

Edited by Christian Jones
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14 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

Hey @Simeon Amburgey I was wondering if you get distortion on some of these piano patches. Like under the Film presets section, the 00 DEFAULT FILM preset sounds fine, but the very next preset 01 LA Beauty has a lot of distortion when played at full velocity. I have 16gb of ram and an RME UFX II set at 128 samples w/ ASIO driver selected in Kontakt 5 standalone, and the audio is not clipping so it's hard to tell why it's happening. Not all patches do it either but many do. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I'm just "playing" the keys with the mouse right now, just clicking the keys to test the piano while I wait for a MIDI controller to arrive. With the mouse, when you click high up on the keys the velocity is softer and as you click down the length of the keys the velocity gets harder and that's when I'm getting the distortion. Was just wondering if that happens on your end too as I'm wondering if it's something on my end or something wrong w/ the library. I feel like you certainly would've caught it though so it's weird.

Now that I've loaded this piano in Kontakt 5 within cakewalk I'm finding that it's really not stable on there and is crashing Cakewalk partialy - I have to remove the Kontakt instance that held the Simple Sam piano library and then things are fine. The vender has been unresponsive from the start so I'll probably just handle this through a paypal but dang, I'm looking hard and I can't see how it's my system that's the issue as every other NI piano library (all I have for piano) works fine.

@Christian Jones, so sorry you are having issues.
So when I first started using Signature Grand one of the things that took me off guard was that it uses a lot of effects processing in many of the patches to create a "mastered" or "characteristic" sound. I was hearing it hit a limiter it seemed then I was able to understand what was going on when seeing what other users and the developer explained things.

So one of the first things is that the way the signal path is set up, the levels of the mics affect how hard the under the hood effects chain is being hit, so I would try that and see what results you get. You can also click on the "wrench" icon to see more of what is going on behind the basic interface.

I do know there has been a recent update that addresses some of the hard limiting sound and there are plans to further refine the interface to give us a better way to control things. Here is a link to download the update:

https://simplesamsamples.s3.amazonaws.com/SG_6-19-20/Signature_Grand_071920_Update.zip

Also here is a great thread on VI Control that has a lot of good information on Signature Grand, and the developer seems to be active there.

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/simple-sam-steinway.93956/

I will also see if I can load this into Kontakt 5 (I am currently at v6) and see what I find out.

 

 

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On 6/10/2020 at 5:32 PM, Christian Jones said:

I watched live. Nice piano, but dang there's just too many great pianos out now. I want something I could dig  better than the Grandeur. I should demo Pianoteq. This piano you reviewed is $49? Do you think it as good or better than Noir or anything else? 

Hey man, do you take requests? If so it'd be cool if you played some of The Young and the Restless in one of these videos. That's the riff I use lately to help guage if I like a piano or not lol

Pianoteq is my go-to. I may give this one a buy, however. I also love OrangeTree Samples Rosewood Grand, a Yamaha emulation that is great. Rarely use anything else, other than the real samples from my Nord Keyboard. But this demo is compelling. I used to sell Steinways. They have the sound down. 

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30 minutes ago, Dave Maffris said:

Pianoteq is my go-to. I may give this one a buy, however. I also love OrangeTree Samples Rosewood Grand, a Yamaha emulation that is great. Rarely use anything else, other than the real samples from my Nord Keyboard. But this demo is compelling. I used to sell Steinways. They have the sound down. 

Please leave us a brief review if you do.

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On 7/24/2020 at 7:34 AM, Simeon Amburgey said:

@Christian Jones, so sorry you are having issues.
So when I first started using Signature Grand one of the things that took me off guard was that it uses a lot of effects processing in many of the patches to create a "mastered" or "characteristic" sound. I was hearing it hit a limiter it seemed then I was able to understand what was going on when seeing what other users and the developer explained things.

So one of the first things is that the way the signal path is set up, the levels of the mics affect how hard the under the hood effects chain is being hit, so I would try that and see what results you get. You can also click on the "wrench" icon to see more of what is going on behind the basic interface.

I do know there has been a recent update that addresses some of the hard limiting sound and there are plans to further refine the interface to give us a better way to control things. Here is a link to download the update:

https://simplesamsamples.s3.amazonaws.com/SG_6-19-20/Signature_Grand_071920_Update.zip

Also here is a great thread on VI Control that has a lot of good information on Signature Grand, and the developer seems to be active there.

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/simple-sam-steinway.93956/

I will also see if I can load this into Kontakt 5 (I am currently at v6) and see what I find out.

 

 

Thanks Simeon. I guess it's ok.. but just about all of the "LA" presets in the Film section and some others need to have the direct mics rolled back a lot to get rid of the distortion, but then a lot of the body of the sound is lost. Do we not have direct control over the under-the hood effects? That would've been helpful. "Playing" this piano w/ the mouse is very revealing though, because every note when clicking on the bottom of the keys is full 127 velocity so I can hear what each notes sounds like at full 127 w/ every click; real chimey/pipey/clanky and metallic - not in a bad way per se, though I personally wasn't in love w/ how a lot of them sounded at full 127, but Idk. I need a proper midi keyboard

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On 7/24/2020 at 7:34 AM, Simeon Amburgey said:

@Christian Jones, so sorry you are having issues.
So when I first started using Signature Grand one of the things that took me off guard was that it uses a lot of effects processing in many of the patches to create a "mastered" or "characteristic" sound. I was hearing it hit a limiter it seemed then I was able to understand what was going on when seeing what other users and the developer explained things.

So one of the first things is that the way the signal path is set up, the levels of the mics affect how hard the under the hood effects chain is being hit, so I would try that and see what results you get. You can also click on the "wrench" icon to see more of what is going on behind the basic interface.

I do know there has been a recent update that addresses some of the hard limiting sound and there are plans to further refine the interface to give us a better way to control things. Here is a link to download the update:

https://simplesamsamples.s3.amazonaws.com/SG_6-19-20/Signature_Grand_071920_Update.zip

Also here is a great thread on VI Control that has a lot of good information on Signature Grand, and the developer seems to be active there.

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/simple-sam-steinway.93956/

I will also see if I can load this into Kontakt 5 (I am currently at v6) and see what I find out.

 

 

Christian:  I purchased this back in June.  I too noticed the distortion on some presets and also several presets being way too hot.  I immediately noticed that I had to do gain staging with many presets--I would have to lower the Kontakt volume slider down for the instrument itself.  This helped some on some presets with them being too loud.  However, I also had to add a limiter to the general output on the Kontakt output buss.  This helped with some presets redlining the outputs, but it did not help with the distortion.

I just downloaded the 071920 update nki that Simeon linked.  Simeon--Thanks for this link.   This update helped with some of the gain staging issue, but the distortion is still there on several presets.  I have had to go into the "wrench" Kontakt setup for each preset and adjust some of the effects in the chain used.  Still, there is too much distortion on some presets.

The new update is better, but there needs to further adjustments to deal with the distortion on some presets

I also just sent SimpleSam an email explaining my issues.  

EDIT:  Here is a very good video showing how to tweak the Kontakt scripting for Signature Grand.  Very helpful

 

Edited by Cecelius2
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Let me add that the developer noted this also on the VI-control thread pertaining to the new 701920 nki update:

  "Certain presets have also been updated to make limiting less aggressive. Future updates will add GUI functionality for controlling the compression/limiting of some presets."

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3 hours ago, Cecelius2 said:

also just sent SimpleSam an email explaining my issues.  

Hmm, I'll be surprised if they get back to you, as they haven't been responsive to me. Anyway as I was typing this I just got an email from PayPal saying simple sam refunded me with no explanation and I didn't ask for that or do a dispute yet so I guess they must have read Simeon's thread just now or something idk. 

Edited by Christian Jones
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I did get a reply to my email today.  I will not repeat all he wrote, but here are a couple paragraphs that pertain to the issue of distortion and some presets being too loud:

"Thank you for your note and for the feedback. Please be aware that many of the presets are meant for a certain style of playing. For example, the preset "LA Beauty" which was mentioned on the Cakewalk forum as causing distortion, is meant for Thomas Newman "American Beauty" type delicate playing. It will certainly distort at louder velocities because it is not meant to be played that way.

If other presets are distorting, they are most likely not the right preset for the playing style. If you would like to send me an export of your midi, I can take a look at it and recommend the most appropriate velocity settings and suggested presets. Also remember that you can always turn down the microphone volumes under the Close and Room microphones for gain staging. This is recommended as it behaves like an analog console.
"

I can live with this since the tonal character of each preset is the desired behaviour as designed by the developer.  I can tweak my velocity settings and maybe do some Kontakt Script editing to adjust the volume levels for my playing.  I also will look forward to any future updates that the developer issues and will monitor that Vi-Control thread.

 

C2

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That's more like what a bouncer on the door of a nightclub would say when you've hit one to many clubs for the night. Or if you don't meet the dress standards. Have you tried putting on a shirt and tie with decent shoes and then resubmitting the request?

Edited by Tezza
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