TruePianos is not like any other type of Piano VST out in the market today as it uses a combination of Sampling and physical modeling to generate its sound.

The project was a collaboration with Roel de Witt and George Yohng (4Front Technologies, Vienna Symphonic Libraries) that resulted in bringing TruePianos to life as a very expressive and playable piano VST.

Dynamics and expression have always been issues when dealing with digital pianos and sampler libraries. Some issues are based on a limited number of recordings and levels of expression. The developers of TruePianos use a lot of innovative ways to get a broad range of expression out of each note.

THE COLOR OF TRUE

They also offer several piano modules to choose from that present you with a wide range of piano types. Rather than specifying a particular brand name which sometimes skews your perception of how something should sound they have given each a creative descriptive title.

Using “jewels” as a theme each module gives you unique characteristics hopefully embodied by the particular “Jewel’ it has been named after. For instance, sometimes you need a bright-sounding piano to stand out in a mix you would probably reach for “Diamond” and in other situations, there is a need for a darker quality to the sound to fit the mood you are looking for you might reach for “Amber”. TruePianos covers these very well. Along with the module types you are given several presets or variations for each module. These present you with a different approach or color or shading for each. TruePianos also includes a nice “reverb” effect to provide a nice performance space without reaching for an additional plug in effect. TruePianos has a nice clean interface that provides the user with everything they would need to get a great performance from the instrument.

DYNAMICS

A very important control on the “advanced” interface is the “Keyboard Dynamics” setting. This is very important for the user to experiment with various settings in order to gain the maximum expression between their particular keyboard controller and TruePianos. I have found this to be very true in my experience as adjusting this one parameter has opened up a world of expression and range when using TruePianos. Another feature of TruePianos is its memory footprint. It loads the selected sound into memory, unlike some other larger piano libraries that rely on gigabytes of hard drive space to store all of the samples and then stream them as you play.

The developers for TruePianos use a lot of innovative ways to get a broad range of expression out of each note.

TWO THREADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

During my testing of the Lenovo S10 Netbook, I found a surprise when doing some tweaks in the TruePianos setup. There is an option to use a multi-core engine and it was not checked because the Intel Atom chip is just a single-core processor. When I checked the box my performance increased slightly but noticeably. Come to find out that the N270 Atom is a Hyperthreading CPU which means it can run two processing threads at one time giving the appearance of having two cores when you look at the performance tab in Window’s Task manager. You can take a look at my test setup which I used at a recent performance. You can see the netbook fits very nicely and provides ample room to see what you are working on.

CONCLUSIONS

I have been very fortunate to have been able to work with TruePianos for most of the projects we have produced over the past year. Having an instrument that is very dynamic and efficient is very important and at times inspiring as sometimes an instrument can take you into different ways of thinking about how you approach a particular arrangement. You can find out more by going to the TruePianos website where you will learn more about this fantastic VST instrument as well as download a 40-day demo version to try it out before you purchase it. I don’t think you will need the full 40 days to make up your mind though. You might see a familiar face on the website as well.