Bluthner Digital Model One review (piano lib)

[kensuguro]

I just got a new piano lib for kontakt 2. It's a recording of a Bluthner, which is also an old school piano maker like Steinway just not quite as famous I guess. Bluthner was recorded as skywalker studio which is the quetest studio in the world. It uses convolution for tone shaping, reverb, and sustain. bla bla. All this stuff you can read about on the pro audio vault website.
http://www.proaudiovault.com/index.htm

So why did I choose Bluthner Digital Model One (BDMO). Currently there's Quantum Leap Pianos, Galaxy II, Garritan Steinway, and Ivory + NI Akoustic (a little dated) to choose from. BDMO is mysterious. Not too many people own it, so I coudln't find too much user feedback. I listened to all the demos.. some of them sound good, some of them actually sound bad. Well, the deal maker was the sustain demo, and the sustain just sounded so good.
http://www.proaudiovault.com/bdmo-ivory-comparison.htm

Well, I got it, installed, did the updates. Spent 2 days messing with it and here's what I found out. First of all, the thing sounds good. Damn good. It's produced very well, and it has a sort of consistency that I haven't come accross in other piano libs yet. (though I don't own much) Second... at least with my p-250, I seem to trigger the soft samples way too much. Third: the samples are "locked" meaning, even if you load them into Kontakt 2, you can't edit them like some other libraries.

To fix the velocity problem the first thing I thought of was to load the kontakt script to fix the velocity curve. But unfortunately since the patches are uneditable, I was totally stuck. Only thing I could do was to write a script (for Reaper's Jesusonic engine) that applies a curve before the MIDI reaches Kontakt. I was able to do this pretty easily since I can write programming code.. but I can't say it'll be an easy solution for everyone.. BDMO does have a fix where you can apply an overall "offset" in the velocity, but that's not really a good solution. Clearly, they overlooked the fact that pianists spend most of their lifetimes tweaking velocity curves.

Once I got my "vel = 127 * ((vel/127) ^ setting)" line of code in there working, the library came to life. The velocity layers shifted very seemlessly, and I was very impressed with the sheer quality of the sound. Only thing was, it sounded a little nasal, or a bit too resonant around the middle C, and so I looked into BDMO's timbre impulses to fix that.

The timbre impulses are actually very interesting. They are in different categories, like "jazz", "pop", "pianos", etc. But they can be divided into "emulates a recording" types and "emulates a specific piano" types. The recording ones aren't too interesting since to me it sounds like just EQ. But the piano impulses are very interesting. They're very subtle, but it really works. I can't really say that a "Japan grand piano" makes BDMO sound just like a Yamaha, but it changes the sound enough so it sounds like a different piano. I flipped through a bunch of these settings and ended up with one I liked. The dry sound of BDMO is a little to clean and up close, so the timbre impulses help make it sound more natural.

Reverb and sustain impulses are also very subtle. I really like that. Reverb won't put the piano in a cathedral, but gives it enough ambience so it appears to be in a different room. I think the reverb is not meant to be a spatial simulation, but more of a tool to shape the tone of the piano. Sustain impulses give extra stereo depth, and very subtle body rumble. I really like that most of these don't kill the signal with way too obvious effect.

What was really impressive is how smooth the velocity layer transitions were. It's 12 layers pedal up and down, which doesn't rank it high in layers.. I'd say pretty much on par with recent trends, or on the lower end. But because the layer switching is so seemless, thanks to their "Linear db Keyboard Velocity" or whatever else technology they used, it makes you so unaware of the layers, it's like magic. I think this is how multi layered samples are supposed to be in the first place, but because of inconsistencies, some layers jump out and break the illusion in other libraries.

The sample layers are biased towards softer sounds, so there's lots of resolution there. I'm not sure if Bluthner pianos are particularly soft sounding, or the producers made a conscious choice to sample lots of softer timbres. Just to put it in perspective, you could be sending velocity around 60, and that'll still give you a muffled tone that I'd classify as p or maybe less. But again, because the layers are so seemless, it doesn't make the more louder layers sound sparse at all.

One thing to note is that BDMO doesn't have sympathetic string resonance modeling. I personally don't really care, but it might be a turn off for some people. It's got good sustain impulses, and that seems to be more important in creating sound character.

Last but not least, the library is 6GB (very small!), and will load with minimal resources. The convolution stuff is very optimized. Running all 3 convolution effects barely increases the cpu meter on my core 2 2.5ghz.

Summary: Darn good recording, very consistent programming. Patch is uneditable so you can't add scripts. Timbre impulses are very effective, but you need to find the one that works for you from a couple hundreded impulses. Samples biased towards soft tones.

Verdict: A very good purchase for $300. Everything about it speaks quality. (as opposed to sampletekk stuff, which is fairly inconsistent) Only problem is, since you can't add velocity curve scripts, it'll have to be done outside of kontakt, which will be a problem for many people.

edit: I messed with BDMO's built in velocity settings a little more. I'm not sure what they do, but it seems like they're not just offsets... it's just 2 knobs, one labeled "vel_ref", and the other "vel_add"... Vel_add seems to do an exponential curve (same thing I was doing) so that is good. Just not sure what "vel_ref" does.

[braincell]

How come you don't have Kontakt 3?

I have the East West Boesendorfer. The softer samples sound better and the loud ones always make my recordings go into the red so I have to use Optimaster to record it. I like to pound the piano sometimes but I find listeners don't enjoy it.

[kensuguro]

well, it seems to me that many library makers went with different formats like PLAY, etc. And since I only use kontakt as a playback app, it didn't really justify the upgrade cost. I could care less that they added more stuff to the built in "library". Are there any kontakt 3 specific 3rd party libs?

[dbmac]

NI has a half-price ($75) upgrade from K2 to K3 available until Dec 31.

/dave

[kensuguro]

oh, heh, pretty good deal!.