![]() ![]() Certainly, my weighted Akai MPK88 keyboard has never felt more responsive than when it’s been hooked up to Keyscape.Īnother area that many developers often get wrong is noise. The C7 Grand Piano, for example, sounds superbly warm and intimate in its lower velocity settings, while the Rhodes have all the nasal-like bite you expect when you wallop the keys. All the instruments demonstrate an expressive range of tonal and dynamic colours, which respond impeccably to your playing. The next-most-important quality is Keyscape’s response to velocity – something that is clearly high in Spectrasonics’ mind, given the number of pre-programmed velocity scaling maps included with Keyscape. In short, Spectrasonics has sourced what should be considered the de facto standard for each keyboard model, so that the patch you load sounds similar to countless versions you’ll have heard on record. Likewise, multiple generations of classic Rhodes, ancient clavichords, and vintage tack pianos have all be dusted off, polished up and restored to their former glory. The C7 Grand Piano, for example, belongs to renowned Los Angeles piano tech, Jim Wilson, who’s spent years tweaking his piano to perfection with Blue Point hammers and Weickert felt. Understanding why that is, though, reveals why Keyscape is such sonically effective musical tool.įirstly, the efforts expended in sourcing and restoring the instruments used in Keyscape has reassuringly nerdy attention to detail. ![]() Some libraries – even the good ones – can feel like a series of recorded snapshots triggered by your fingers’ movements, whereas Keyscape feels and plays like a real instrument. We could wax lyrical about the quality of the sounds, of course, but what immediately grabs you is how good Keyscape feels underneath your fingers. Keyscape is a software instrument that demands to be played. If you’re an existing Spectrasonics user, it’s also worth noting that Keyscape patches can be opened directly from Omnisphere (more on this later), assuming you’ve upgraded to version 2.3 or higher. ![]() Rather than thinning down the velocity layers, the lite installation reduces the number of keyboard models from 36 to eight, which should be sufficient for those playing live, who simply need a good version of each principal instrument group. If you’re mainly interested in ‘big players’ included in Keyscape (like the LA Custom C7 piano, for example) there’s the option of a 30GB ‘lite’ install. At a total of 77GB, Keyscape is certainly a big library, although when you consider than many of the 36 instruments have been sampled with up to 32 velocity levels as well with round robins, you can actually see that the space has been used effectively, rather than just being squandered.Īs you’d expect, Keyscape benefits from a healthy RAM allocation (8GB is the recommended standard, but we tested it with 64GB) and access to an SSD drive, but there is a Thinning button to lighten the load on older computers or on slower HDs, as well as a variety of options to fine-tune how Keyscape streams its sample data. Keyscape is available as a download direct from the Spectrasonics site, or as boxed edition, with the content supplied on two USB drives. Scan the list of instruments and you’ll be impressed by the comprehensive set of electromechanical and acoustic pianos, or the host of intriguing additions like the Dulcitone and Chimeatron, but does Keyscape really raise the bar over what many players have access to already? Thanks for the Memory The concept is simple – an exhaustive library of 36 sought-after ‘collector’ keyboards painstakingly multisampled and presented in an Omnisphere-like interface. Given this supreme attention to detail, the fact that Keyscape has been almost 10 years in the making shouldn’t really come as a great surprise to us. From the task of sampling a range of acoustic and electronic sound sources, through to creating a creatively rewarding virtual instrument – not to mention all the presets required to show all of this off – Spectrasonics has demonstrated perfection is time-intensive task. In truth, instruments like Omnisphere, Trillian and Stylus RMX are all products of years of investment. ![]()
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