Ivory Piano Key

[Monica Okane]

OurAward-Winning flagship product, critically acclaimed as the "Platinum Standard" for Virtual Pianos. Ivory II Grand Pianos features our groundbreaking technology for Sympathetic String Resonance, plus a host of new features for more expressive detail than ever!

The playing experience is simply extraordinary with an emotional range extending from the heartiest fortissimo to the most delicate and nuanced pianissimo. Ivory II Grand Pianos will breathe under your fingers, inspiring your best performance from a truly organic instrument.

A host of new piano-centric features have been added to the Ivory II engine. Principal among them is Sympathetic String Resonance, a long sought after but elusive characteristic of real pianos that Synthogy approaches in a completely new and unique way, realizing the true complexities and subtleties of sympathetic string excitation. Harmonic Resonance Modeling is a brand new technology that does not rely upon triggering additional samples, ordinary sine waves, or recordings in any way. Rather, notes struck that are harmonically related excite the actual complex overtones of the notes that are being held, in the same manner that undamped strings ring in a real acoustic piano. The result is an unprecedented new level of realism.

At the heart of Ivory II are Ivory's legendary pianos. Each Ivory piano has been further refined and developed, including expanded velocity levels (up to 18 per piano), additional soft pedal samples, and more release samples. Synthogy's decades of expertise in piano development, along with proprietary "timbre interpolation" technology combine to deliver greater fidelity, unrivaled playability, and a musical experience that is unsurpassed.

Ivory II represents the most significant design enhancement to Ivory's custom piano technology since its introduction. Years in the making, every effort has been taken to assure that Ivory II is a true and worthy successor to the legacy established by our original Ivory products.

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The world's most popular virtual grand piano collection just got better with the creation of Ivory II-Grand Pianos. Featuring a greatly expanded sound set with nearly double the velocity layers, and the improved Ivory II piano DSP engine with Harmonic Resonance Modeling for true Sympathetic String Vibration, Ivory II-Grand Pianos soars at the highest possible levels of sampling and synthesis technology.

The Grand Pianos collection features three marvelous and versatile Grand Pianos: Bsendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, German Steinway D 9' Concert Grand and Yamaha C7 Grand. Synthogy's exclusive, powerful Sample Playback and DSP engine, engineered specifically for recreating the acoustic piano, is sure to inspire your best performance.

In this video, Michael Babbitt explores some of the features that separate Ivory II from other virtual pianos, including half pedaling, timbre velocity interpolation, sympathetic string vibration and harmonic resonance modeling.

Both the Ivory and the Ravenscroft sound like they're choking on the fast run 8 seconds in.

The Ravenscroft sounds much better in this comparison than it did in the other thread, this time it's a close race.

I've been messing with Pure Piano and beginning to be a fan. For me it requires a diminishing of low frequencies. I have dissatisfactions with the bass in all the top iOS pianos. Not enough discrete-ness in bass chords.

@espiegel123 said:

@Paulo164 : is that your playing? Pure Piano was the only one that kept up. Does Ravenscroft always glitch out for you like that? Is it a polyphony issues that only shows up in fast runs?

@Paulo164 as much as I like the sound of Ravenscroft, I have had tons of polyphony issues with it when triggering with sustained notes from Polyphase, though never when playing it myself. I w OK ukd be unlikely to be doing the kinds of trills you were here.

@Gavinski said:

@Paulo164 as much as I like the sound of Ravenscroft, I have had tons of polyphony issues with it when triggering with sustained notes from Polyphase, though never when playing it myself. I w OK ukd be unlikely to be doing the kinds of trills you were here.

Ok, I may try to download a regular virtuoso piece from piano-e-competition (maybe in MIDI HD if I can find it) to see if this supposedly MIDI throttle comes from my setup or occurs within the sound engine of Ravenscroft itself.

@Paulo164 said:

Ok, I may try to download a regular virtuoso piece from piano-e-competition (maybe in MIDI HD if I can find it) to see if this supposedly MIDI throttle comes from my setup or occurs within the sound engine of Ravenscroft itself.

Those recordings are really good, but they might not be optimized for the VST. In this case the Ravenscroft handels the midi the best (see around 2:00, you can hear some stuttering where something goes wrong with the stustain pedal, the Ravescroft doesn't have that)

I rendered the MIDI with Cubasis 3, internal reverb is disabled for all and instead I use the Roomworks reverb on "Bright Hall". The first one is as comparison the internal Cubasis 3 piano, just as reference what "bad" might sound like.

Hi Paulo, sorry, I donkt know the answer to your SoundCloud question. Thinking about the fast passage of your Nocturne,I cannot remember any Ravenscroft or Module dropout on the occasional really fast playing I do. Something else is going on, I think.

Yes, weird. The MIDI file is the same. Maybe Pure Piano has longer release samples, which is more forgiving with this kind of fast run.

After several weeks owning the 3 apps, I still think Ravenscroft is the more enjoyable to play and the closest to a real piano (waiting for PianoTeq...).

Whether you like the tone or not compared to a "conventional" Steinway D is another concern.

Real ivory keytops are naturally beautiful. They are usually made from the tusks of elephants or similar animals and filed into perfect rectangles for keytops. The tusks themselves are made from keratin, the same material as hair and fingernails, so they are long-lasting and unique as a fingerprint. Ivory is also slightly textured and reduces slipping and sticking as you play.

This total ban works hard to drive down demand for ivory and help save endangered elephants, allowing their population to return. Even black market demand has been slashed after the ban took place, and since then, elephant populations have more than doubled.

Because the trade in ivory is completely outlawed around the world, the keytops are not valuable. But even if it was legal, remember that only a thin veneer on top of the key is made of ivory. The entire key isn't made of solid ivory. This thin veneer can chip, crack, and peel (remember, it's made of the same material as fingernails, so it's subject to the same kind of damage). This thin slice is such little material that even ivory artists probably wouldn't be able to work with it.

If you prefer modern cruelty-free replacements, I offer imitation ivory keytop heads, tails, and even seamless keytops. These replacements can be shaped, color matched, and filed to look just like the real thing. It also has fine grain, providing that signature ivory texture and grip.

In the studio, it's less of a problem if the your virtual piano drops out and you have to spend a couple of minutes assigning extra memory and reloading, but on stage, where mad fools like me are now attempting to use virtual instruments like Ivory, such unwanted intervals can feel like a lifetime! With Ivory, however, if something went wrong with your memory allocations, you would still have a playable piano to get you through the next song. Of course the best way to avoid this problem is to use OS X with its dynamic memory allocation, and most people I know are now using OS X on their laptops (even if their studio machines may be running OS 9 for a long time to come). Under OS X, at least you don't have to quit your sequencer to allocate it more memory and then relaunch.

Even in these days of cheap and plentiful RAM, there will come a point (especially under OS 9) where you will be stretching the memory allocation of your machine. This may be worth doing if you are playing a Debussy solo piano piece, say, with a huge dynamic range and high polyphony requirements, but if you are adding a Jerry Lee Lewis part to a full rock track, you are wasting a huge amount of memory with samples which wouldn't be heard even if you did trigger them. Some of the eight-layer Keysets are extremely memory-hungry, so selecting a Keyset with fewer layers in it (or indeed an 88-note version of the Bsendorfer if you don't intend to play the bottom octave) means that you are leaving more memory available for other virtual instruments to sit in.

Of course, under OS X, the dynamic memory allocation should allow you to get away with much more. However, even OS X has finite resources, and there is no point using them up on Ivory if you don't need the full subtlety of the eight-layer Keysets. And remember that in a fully arranged track, you would probably compress a real piano to make sure that it always speaks over the top of whatever else is playing. The virtual equivalent of this is probably playing at MIDI velocities which only trigger the uppermost dynamic samples.

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