Spring sale over at sampletekk 50% off all items.
 
This weekend 3 for 2 with discount!! Great deal, may be filling out my collection.
 
Really love the Old Lady and White Grand.
 
The new "Black" one looks intresting anyone tried it?
 
http://www.sampletekk.com/
 

Crowned One

Spring sale over at sampletekk 50% off all items.
 
This weekend 3 for 2 with discount!! Great deal, may be filling out my collection.
 
Really love the Old Lady and White Grand.
 
The new "Black" one looks intresting anyone tried it?
 
http://www.sampletekk.com/
 

Hi:  I own several SampleTek pianos and see them as great products for the price, big bang for the buck and thank Bitflipper for pointing me and others to them.  I own the new Black for Kontakt5 and The White Grand, Emperor and Old Lady.  I really like the new Black.  One issue is that it only runs in  Kontakt 5, nor Kontakt4; it does come with Kontakt5 player version.  Again, it will not run in Kontakt4.  Since I have Kontakt4 it is a little bit of a hassle having to run kontakt5 player just to use this Piano.  I like the fact the New Black for Kontakt5 has a "new" gui that is much more tweakable and user friendly.  It allows you to adjust the Black's tonal palette to your taste.  I did a brief critique of it in the following thread, post #23 or so:  http://forum.cakewalk.com...print=true&mpage=1  This thread is two pages long and several people comment.  To save you some time I will reprint my post here, but you should look at this thread to see what others also are saying.

Here is my critique from that thread:
Here is a long winded critique of SampleTekk's Black for Kontakt 5.   I played around last night with the new Black and was generally impressed. The new GUI allows for tailoring the tone of this Steinway D based instrument. It is intuitive in that most users will know what reverb, eq, velocity do. For me, this new GUI makes this SampleTekk instrument much more usable and capable of getting the tone, ambiance and resonance for example. I could dial in with ease a warm and gentle piano, or a bright powerful and clear rock piano in seconds.


  Velocity Section--It was very easy to adjust the velocity curve to my taste (three curve options) and then dial up or down the velocity sensitivity knob to fit both my finger pressure, my midi keyboard (M-Audio ES88-- not the most sensitive model) and even adjust it for the particular song. So if I am playing a gentle piece, I can dial back slightly to help get that just right; if it is a rock mix, you can dial it up to make sure the tone is forceful. This is very helpful for those of us who are not the best pianists.


  EQ Section—This is a simple three knob eq, one band EQ. One controls the frequency (20-20k), one controls the Q (from a sharp peak to a more gentle curve), one band for gain. I used the more gentle curve and with just a little gain boast, could turn this Steinway tone into a much more bright, edgy instrument, or by focusing the frequency toward a lower midrange, can make this Steinway tone warmer, darker.


  Pedals—there are three pedals (sustain, sustenuto, una Corda) all which have midi learn. I just used the sustain pedal, but the options are there, as well as a button that allows half pedaling.


  Reverb—there are three knobs—one for pre-delay, one for size, one for amount. There is also a picture which has the type of reverb. At first, I could not figure out how to change the reverb type (I should have read the manual first). Eventually I found that by click/hold & drag, I could drag the picture up or down and this rolled up or down through the reverb types. There is a gold plate, a room, a digitial and one or two others. I was surprised at the limited number of types here. I expected the choice of different concert halls, cathedral, clubs, etc. I was also surprised that the room reverb was very subtle even with the amount and size dialed up. The digital reverb, however, can be dramatic and create a wash if desired. Another surprise was that by dialing up or down the size of the reverb I would get a an annoying zipper sound. BTW, I have an I7 2600 CPU with 16gigs of ram so this is not CPU or RAM related.


  Voicing-Intellisave—this button allows you to save CPU resources if needed. I did not try it.


  Body Section—Here there are three controls. One is for “shimmer” which is SampleTekks term for string resonance. One is for “sympathetic resonance” which dials in the amount of resonance yo get when you play and hold a chord with the left hand, and play a melody over the top of it with the right hand. This control sets the amount of resonance heard on the unplayed, undamped strings. Finally there is a control dial for room ambiance. When dialed to the left, there is no room, just a close mic'ing effect. When dialed to the right, there is more room ambiance. With all these controls the effect is subtle and nuanced., not dramatic.


  Noise—There are two dials for adjusting the amount of hammer noise and pedal noise. These are nice for solo piano work where you might want to hear the sound of the hammer release or the pedal release. The effect can be none or dialed up where it is very noticeable.


  What's missing? Well I was surprised that there were no pop-up widows or hover type windows over the dials when they were adjusted. So there was no way of knowing the specific amount from let's say 1-100 or in decibels or the frequency that was being selected. I could not know what frequency I was selecting on the EQ or what amount of pre-delay in milleseconds in Reverb, or the amount of gain in either decibels or from 1-127, or the amount of resonance from 1-100 was dialed up. The absence of having some kind of numeric hover or popup window meant that there was no way of dialing in that exact amount the next time I used it. This is a feature that needs to be update. BTW, it is one that is found on the some competitors' products like NI's NY Grand for example, which has a similar GUI.


  Overall the tone and the simplicity of the GUI makes this instrument a versatile and very tweakable Steinway Grand, and the total download is only 1.29Gigs. It is easy to get a warm tone with some room ambiance, or to dial in an aggressive brighter close mic'ed sound that will cut through a mix. My immediate and initial impression was that it was nice and that I was glad I purchased it; there was no buy remorse with this one, especially with a discount price less than $50. This could easily be a default piano for some if only because it is so versatile and easy to tweak. SampleTekk has moved forward with this new GUI and an easily adjustable tone pallet. They do need to update the dials/knobs so that they reveal precise decible/numeric amounts so that the user knows the exact value that is being selected. Per and his crew need to bring this new GUI system to their other instruments. 

Thanks for the review. I'm seriously considering this.

One thing to remember about this New Black for Kontakt5.  It is based upon the Steinway Black that Sampletekk already had.  So remember it is still going to be a Black Steinway at its core that is more tweakable because of the new GUI with Kontakt5.  Some of the tweaks are subtle and not dramatic such as the Body section.

Wow - Per's outdone himself this time with that sale! For anyone who doesn't have pianos covered (and even for those who do), these are outstandingly good sounding instruments.

cecelius2


One thing to remember about this New Black for Kontakt5.  .

It will work in the free Kontakt player, its the only one to do so, which probably contributed to the higher price. Its become my goto for grand piano, but I still like Old Lady and Emperor and Estonia. Rain and Vertitical Pop are both excellent uprights.
 

 

I bought XLN Addictive and was very impressed and seeing that Sampletekk did the recording for that program got 3 pianos thru this deal.

Try as I might I can't seem to get them going in Halion 4.5 (latest build). Missing samples. 

The installation instructions say to put all .rar files into the same directory and unpack the first- the others will unpack automatically. I don't think this is happening for me. 

I seem to recall celcius having similiar difficulties when he first got into Sampletekk pianos. What am I douing wrong here? 

I bought Rain piano first as a sort of trial and that works and sounds great, but it's only one .rar file.  Now I have Old Lady, V Pop and White Grand that should work in Halion but I can't figure out how. 

backwoods

I bought XLN Addictive and was very impressed and seeing that Sampletekk did the recording for that program got 3 pianos thru this deal.

Try as I might I can't seem to get them going in Halion 4.5 (latest build). Missing samples. 

The installation instructions say to put all .rar files into the same directory and unpack the first- the others will unpack automatically. I don't think this is happening for me. 

I seem to recall celcius having similiar difficulties when he first got into Sampletekk pianos. What am I douing wrong here? 

I bought Rain piano first as a sort of trial and that works and sounds great, but it's only one .rar file.  Now I have Old Lady, V Pop and White Grand that should work in Halion but I can't figure out how. 

Don't know if I can help.  I have the kontakt version.  I would email Per at Sampletekk; he is quick to reply and will give you the correct way to download and install these for Halion.  Sorry not to be of more help, but I don't want to mislead you.  Good luck.

Yes - email Per. He's very helpful.

backwoods


I bought XLN Addictive and was very impressed and seeing that Sampletekk did the recording for that program got 3 pianos thru this deal.

Try as I might I can't seem to get them going in Halion 4.5 (latest build). Missing samples. 

The installation instructions say to put all .rar files into the same directory and unpack the first- the others will unpack automatically. I don't think this is happening for me. 

I seem to recall celcius having similiar difficulties when he first got into Sampletekk pianos. What am I douing wrong here? 

I bought Rain piano first as a sort of trial and that works and sounds great, but it's only one .rar file.  Now I have Old Lady, V Pop and White Grand that should work in Halion but I can't figure out how. 

Check your mail again. You should have a link to the other rar files...