Yamaha’s hand built semi concert grand recorded in 7 velocity layers with Performance and Ambisonic/VR perspectives.
A new addition to The Experience series, the Yamaha S6 is a hand built piano that’s 7 feet long. Yamaha’s of this vintage are soughtafter for their ability to cut through a mix, as the acquisition of Bosendorfer’s technology has resulted in a slightly different character in the newer Yamaha pianos.
Technical Stuff:
* Performance and Ambisonic Perspectives using 12 microphones capsules
* 7 Velocity Layers to capture the entire piano’s dynamic range
* Ambisonic VR routing
* Action noise AND Damper release triggers
* Half Pedaling
* Separate SFZ files for each microphone pair
Six microphone capsules were used for the Performance Perspective. I used K87 style capsules in an AB array over the strings to capture the brilliance of the soundboard. Each of these mics contain two capsules, and I’ve arranged the Kontakt instrument such that you can adjust the polar pattern of the microphone. You can choose Cardioid or Omni, or anywhere in between by using the slider. I also positioned some SE8 small diaphragm mics in ORTF over the hammers, and it gives you a nice transparency to the sound – much like a listener would hear.
The Ambisonic Perspective also uses six microphone capsules to capture the player soundspace and is ideally used with Ambisonic plugins. Those six mics were positioned in the same array as the F308 library, with Level, angle up, and angle down (XY). Please refer to the Fazioli F308 videos for the VR/ambisonic setups that use the IEM plugin suite to render binaural audio and create the virtual reality space. I’ve also left a readme with basic instructions on this as well.
Besides being a superb piano tone to sample, I also recorded and coded the damper releases. Damper releases are the sound the strings make as the dampers come down and stop the vibration. Since this library also includes half pedaling, it was a real challenge to get the damper sounds to change volume according to velocity, note length, halfpedal, etc. Action noises are much more simple to sample because they basically don’t change volume (or don’t need to). Play around with the Damper releases and discover how realistic it makes the playing experience.
