The Kawai-EX Pro sample Library is a fabulous, powerfull and bright 9-foot (276cm) KAWAI EX concert grand piano that used to be in the Kennedy center in Washington DC. We worked closely with Lance Herring on this library (this is our second attempt after the AcademicGrand) and decided to give our project a new dimension, we carefully recorded this extraordinary instrument with 3 microphone pairs and state of the art Gear to try and recreate how powerfull and precise this instrument can be.
Preferences The Kawai EX PRO is now in V3 and includes many new features to make it one of the most complete pianos on the market. Each feature is detailed below and of course it still contains the features of the previous versions like the release volume, pedal noise and key noise.
Three microphone positions We recorded the Kawai EX PRO with three microphone positions:
- The Close position with a pair of microphones close to the strings inside the piano to provide deep bass and rich resonances.
- The Player position with a pair of microphones next to the head of the piano player to really get the feeling of being in front of the piano.
- The Rim position with a pair of microphones at the side of the piano to give more of a soloist playing with a piano perspective. You can enable / disable, load / unload and mix each microphone position separately to get exactly the sound you want. Each microphone has three different controls:
- Gain.
- On / Off: You can easily enable or disable each microphone position.
- Load: You can load / unload the samples of each microphone position. This saves Ram usage if you only use one position. Of course the controls are greyed out when the samples are unloaded.
Resonances The resonances on a piano give some kind of a reverb effect when all of the strings start resonating. There are two kinds of resonances that are important to model on a piano, the pedal down resonances and the sympathetic resonances between the held notes. Both these effects are present in the Kawai EX PRO, you can even change the amount of each of them.
Repedaling / Half pedaling On a real piano, the pedal is not a simple on and off and in classical music, people often use the repedaling and half pedaling.
- Repedaling allows you to "restart" a chord that has been released with the pedal if the decay is not ended yet. this is especially used when you want to blend chords together.
- Half Pedaling is as its name implies what happens when you play with the pedal half pressed. the decay is much longer and as the strings are not completely dampened, you hear some resonances.
MIDI controls We added a few midi controls to the older version. The sostenuto and sustain CC can be changed in case you want for example use an expression pedal instead of a regular on off pedal. You can also change the Midi curve, the dynamics and the velocity response to really adjust the library to your liking, keyboard and playing style.
Technical Specifications
- 10.9Gb uncompressed, 2.15Gb compressed in lossless flac format, around 5000 samples.
- 3 microphone positions that you can mix from the interface.
- 5 Velocity layers for the sustain (5 on pedal up and 5 on pedal down).
- 3 sets of 5 Velocities for the release, one for different sustain lenght (staccato).
- Pedal down resonance.
- Key noises samples.
- Sustain pedal noises (up and down), triggered automatically.
- Advanced UVI scripting giving you access to a simple yet powerfull interface and advanced features.
System Requirements
PC
- KAWAI-EX PRO comes with its own sample player, the UVI Workstation 3 (requires v3.0.0 or later).
- We provide it for free with every library that you buy, you don't need to buy an expensive sampler to use our products. It works on Mac (10.9 or later) and PC (windows 8 or later), in standalone or as a plugin (VST / AU / AAX ) and in 64 bits only.
Mac
- KAWAI-EX PRO comes with its own sample player, the UVI Workstation 3 (requires v3.0.0 or later).
- We provide it for free with every library that you buy, you don't need to buy an expensive sampler to use our products. It works on Mac (10.9 or later) and PC (windows 8 or later), in standalone or as a plugin (VST / AU / AAX ) and in 64 bits only.
