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stevencravis
Steven Cravis is a pianist, composer and soundtracks producer in San Francisco, influenced by Sting, George Winston, Hans Zimmer and Andreas Vollenweider. His works have been heard in the award winning QUELL app by Fallen Tree Games UK, Calm app, Animal Planet, CBS, CNN, NBC, Matchroom Sport UK and more.
stevencravis’s Reviews
CRYSTAL CLEAR, BRIGHT AND INSPIRING
I'm a professional recording artist and have been searching for the perfect virtual piano for many years. Usually in other libraries one or two octaves has a sweet spot of realism, but other parts lack, or the touch sensitivity does not feel properly expressive across the 88 keys. Dore Mark's S6 v1.3 for Kontakt has qualities I never was even able to get at studios with real grand pianos.
I didn't even try the Ambisonic files yet, but already just loading the 'Performance' nki of this S6 was possibly the best virtual piano I've ever played and recorded! It has a brightness, and crystal clear tone that is consistent for the whole frequency range. In fact, it even had some of the best quality low range presence and clarity I've ever tried. Even though I wasn't using the Ambisonic files so far, the S6 v1.3 Performance .nki has an incredible 3D stereo image to my ears, both through speakers and headphones.
I tested using Roland RD-700NX 88 weighted keyboard as the midi controller. Using Logic Pro as my DAW, I was impressed that even if I recorded with Audio preference buffer at 256 and Low Latency mode, (my system is Intel i9 with 64 GB RAM) it worked better than many OTHER piano libraries which would cut off sounds at such a low buffer. Bouncing an audio file, it worked well at 512 and 1024 buffer.
The default settings are very nicely chosen. The only thing I experimented with changing was turning reverb off, to use an external reverb plug in. Though the included reverb is high quality. Even with no reverb, this piano sounds exceptional.
I felt that the seven velocities per key were perfectly chosen for expressiveness. Even while holding down a sustain pedal, I was able to play many varied velocity chords in succession for a more rhythmic and lively, expressive extremely real piano experience and recorded result. In fact I immediately was inspired to record my next single for worldwide distribution on this piano, for release on September 2, 2022.
If I was rich I would invest in Dore Mark as a whole new virtual piano company. He understands the piano both musically and technically, and has definitely put a tremendous amount of time, attention to detail and incorporated much user input for revisions to get some of the most realistic results I've ever experienced from a virtual instrument! I like that the samples are 48 khz, and most digital distributors (and TV and Film) accept 24 bit, 48 khz audio.
Dore Mark has done it again!
This piano is highly playable and inspiring. I like the depth of the bass, the clarity of bass to mid-range, which is not usually easy to accomplish on sample piano (and other instrument) libraries, and the bright harmonics of the upper octaves. I found it immediately highly inspiring, to compose and record. I like that this has the recorded piano quality that I would release professionally. The dry samples are so clean that this library works quite well with third party reverb (or other effects) when turning down the included reverb slider all the way. I liked the default brightness of the color slider high position, but also found quite a beautiful deep, darker tone for the whole range of the piano when sliding that color setting down to about 60% or even lower.