Waves Grand Rhapsody Piano Reviews

IN my opinion, the best grand piano sound out there.

Very crisp sound. If you like bright piano sound, this is your thing. Comes with great presets and Waves never disappoints.

My favorite out there. Magical, I can highly recommended.

I needed a sampled piano that I could use as a plugin as well as stand alone on my desktop for practice. This fits the part well. It took me about 5 minutes to find a mic configuration I liked, and I was off and running.
I've been playing guitar for over 40 years, and music theory has always been a mystery to me. Having a piano literally sitting in front of me all day (keyboard on desk and plugin always ready) means that anytime I need it I can work out a chord progression or scale on the keyboard. I've learned more about music in a few weeks than all of the years combined. I'm sure there are other plugins out there that you can run on your desktop and plug a midi keyboard into, but I didn't find any of this quality in this price range. There are the added benefits of the Waves standard features; the ability to keep two setups (setups A and B) at hand, collapse the window, and scale the entire app to save space.
Musically, this is one of the best purchases I have ever made, and at not much more that what a guitar cable costs.

First, I haven't heard so good sounding a piano. I also have Native Instruments NOIRE, and I love it, especially for the particles engine, but to be honest, I like the sound of the Grand Rhapsody much better. Well, you have heard from other reviews that Waves has a restrictive licensing policy- you only get a license to reinstall once a year. Well nobody wants to get ripped off, and Waves is like the rest of us. What happened to me is my Windows 10 OS got corrupted, and I had to reinstall, which as you know, wipes all your files. I had not recently backed up music, and I lost some projects! Then after we reinstalled Windows, I embarked on the ARDUOUS task of reinstalling my DAW (Ableton) and all my VST's and whatever samples I could recover. The way I installed them became problematic, and I had to uninstall and start over. Reinstalling Grand Rhapsody, it wouldn't work, and a text box asked me to scan again for a license. In the process, I learned that they only allow a reinstallation once a year- I found out too late. But I went onto their website, and did a text chat with their tech support guy, and when I explained my predicament, he restored my license so I could recover it, and it works in Ableton again. Don't be put off by Waves' once-a-year licensing policy. If you have a reasonable explanation for needing a license renewal, and they know you are not ripping them off, they will be fair about it. BUY THIS PIANO. IT'S GREAT!

Yes the installation process can be a bit grueling but what isn't. I really suggest downloading the SD version because the HD is around 14 gigs and it's very hardware intensive, so the SD is just fine. I'm using a 2017 MacBook Air with a 250gb SSD with 8 gigs of RAM and it runs wonderfully as a standalone sampled keyboard and also a plug-in. For those having problems installing or your programs recognizing the plugins I suggest going on YouTube and watching the Waves Installation tutorial and most of all be patient and I promise it'll be worth the wait. The best $... I've ever spent.

I cannot believe it sounds so good and is so adjustable. Seriously, I cannot believe it. The sound is like no other I have player before. Amazing sound and the price is unbelievable.

Fantastic sounding instrument. One tip, If you don't have a high horsepower CPU and a ton of RAM get your mix right with the lo-res samples, then switch to hi-res and bounce it to stereo.

I was stopped in my tracks as I saw the $29 price tag.. Either it's crappy or a print mistake.. I listened to the videos and decided to order it... WAY past amazing! I own a number of stand alone but this is by FAR the best I've heard bar none. For the price it's unbeatable.. Very clear and super realistic.. it has a clearer tone in the upper register which I like and really cuts through my other synths and pads when I need it to.. This is definitely one of the best pianos I've heard.. A real bargain... get it

This is my second VST piano purchase and I am well pleased by the product and by Sweetwater's discount. Wonderful sound and easy to use! Nothing to dislike except minus a half point due to the dated and unscalable user interface (stylistically fine, but too small and too low resolution for today's larger monitors).

Where do I even begin. So for me I've been debating back and forth about using software for my piano sounds and lately I've been seeing a lot of musicians using it live and the they sound great. I've also seen some bad situations where computers crashed, sounds want play, sounds gets stuck on a note, and all this has made me hesitant doing the switch to use vst. Finally when Waves came out with this and hearing how good it sounded this was the sound I've been looking for the real piano sound. I finally downloaded it and from the first chord it was amazing sound that I haven't heard in years. It felt like you are actually sitting at a real piano. I've been playing this piano non stop my favorites are the intimacy, red piano and fat and punchy. I like for my emotions to really be expressed when I'm playing and this has definitely been the solution for me. And lastly at this price point you can't beat it. So thanks waves for this awesome grand rhapsody piano and also thanks for Sweetwater salesman Chris calling to check in with me to make sure everything was working. And the only reason why I gave it 4.5 star which I really didn't want to give it but this is the only con I had which was changing between patches it takes a while for the next patch to load in and for me I'm a on the go guy I typically change my patches after each song so hopefully this issue will be fixed soon.

I have been exclusively using the stock (Air instruments) Grand Piano in Pro Tools for 6 years, which is a good , but there"s latency issues unless you disable plugins and reduce the hardware buffer size. Even when running my hardware buffer at 1024 samples, there"s very little latency with this instrument.

Whilst the Grand Rhapsody takes a long time to load the samples whenever you change the microphones, this piano sounds fantastic, and is so customisable. The built in reverb effects and optional room mics help to create a lot of ambience if you need it.

Most plugins i have load very quickly, but this one takes and insane amount of time too load, not just to open but for every preset, each time i change it, its awesome and it sounds great but i cant even properly experiment withouth wasting a huge amount of time

It has an above awesome piano sound "BUT" it took forever to load just the basic library sounds down, and awhile for the samples to load to the plugin just to use them and each time you select a new preset its wait time again yes you have to download the library sounds before it will work, I wrote waves and stated that at least it should have a couple sounds for just using it stand alone, no response, anyway with that said you must have to have more than 64 bit op system for no latency, its not real bad but you wouldn't want to record with-it glitching nothing running in the back ground. running on Reaper DAW, no other plugin have I ever had more issues with but for $ why am I complaining, or maybe im the only one that cant stand hours of frustration with just a simple download

Although I do like the pianos a lot, It's offset by the the authorization process and restrictions. There is NO WAY to conveniently access the plugin by more than one computer at a time, without physically (or virtually) moving the license. You can put the license in the "License cloud," but you still have to access the the Waves license app to accomplish with the following process:

On the A computer
Launch Waves Central. Applications > Waves Central.
Log into Waves Central using your Waves account information.
Click on Manage Licenses.
In the left-hand panel, click on the A computer.
In the middle panel, choose the licenses to move.
In the right-hand panel, choose your License Cloud.
Click Send Licenses.

On the B computer
Launch Waves Central and log in using your Waves account information.
Click on Manage Licenses.
Your licenses will be waiting for you on your License Cloud.
In the middle panel, choose the licenses to move.
In the right-hand panel, choose the B computer.
Click Send Licenses

You can also install the license on a flash drive, but then you run the risk of losing, forgetting, or having the dongle stolen, leaving yourself in the lurch.

With most of the other plugins I own, I'm allowed at least two installs that are accessible without this cumbersome process.

Basically a waste of my money. WGRP VST3 does not play well with Reason. Even the beta team at Reason couldn't duplicate my problems. The basic samples are gorgeous, but too many midi problems. The rest of the interface is overkill for me. I want a clean, sparkling, grand. Not interested in mutilating the sound or hearing pedal and key sounds that are louder than the strings.

So you're reading reviews. Some say, "Wow! Amazing." Others say horrible. So let me help make sense - and like all the other opinions take with a grain of salt.

1. SAMPLES - Both the HD and LD samples have that typical "grainy-ness" to them. My 15 year old Roland FP-3 did too. But professional modern digital keyboards don't. I was surprised... after all it's 10GB of samples (although I suspect that's due to the many mic placements). I thought it would sound as delicious as Kontacts pianos.

2. KEY UP / PEDAL - These are the sounds of the piano's mechanisms (levers, rods, etc.) They're comically loud. I've never played a real piano that was this loud. Sure, you can turn it off. But the judgement and aesthetic decision alone makes you wonder, "Does Waves have a clue?" It's this general "clunkiness" that you find throughout the VST.

3. UNBALANCED VELOCITY - The velocity is really clunky. Again, adjustable, but when you get into the upper octaves it's like they tried to simulate a graduated keyboard by tweaking with velocity. In short, it comes across like you're pounding the upper octaves... and I'm a very delicate player.

4. NOT FUN - The Garageband keyboards were always fun. They worked. The response curves just felt "right". This isn't a fun VST. It's clunky and it seems more about tweaking and fiddling than playing.

CONCLUSION: If you're not a piano player and need passable sounds in a mix, this will work. Especially on sale... EZKeys is MUCH more fun; however, it's a fortune comparatively. But if you're a piano player looking for that "touch" you better give this a serious test drive before spending the 10GB of HDD and $...

DISCLOSURE: I love a good grand piano. We have them at work and they're a joy. I also really love modern digital pianos. I think they're fantastic too. I play mostly acoustic music so my reference point tends to be the real thing.

Installed fine. My lappy has 250G SSD 16G matched ram Quad core processor. The problems are with some of the pianos. Lots of reverb for instance will cause crackling when pressing keys. I can use GR but only light usage adding effects causes problems. Still I bought it on a sale but not a good product.

thought to ad to the complaint that this is an extremely cpu heavy plugin which takes longer to load than any plugin I have. Do not understand this but oh well . this is as of 1/05/2019 comparing to Kontakt pianos this one kind of sucks

I see this as sort of a "character" piano: lots of attack, somewhat metallic, very compressed sounding. It might work in particular tracks and settings, but it is far from a go-to piano. It's very hard to put the sound close the listener no matter how I experiment with the different mic options. Staccato notes sound odd, too. As inexpensive as it was, it's not a huge loss, and it's another color in the palette, but given its sample library size (14GB), I expected a LOT more tonal depth, but I assume it's mostly mic positions taking up that space. I much prefer playing, say, the grand that comes with Ableton Live, or a hardware workstation.

Takes to long to load ,not for someone who needs a piano sound for a gig , might work ok in a studio when you have time for it to load .

It is hard to know where to start... but in summary a complete disaster.
I made the easy mistake to set screen resolution to full screen. Which took over the whole screen with no way to access the menu bar.
With no keyboard shortcuts to undo my mistake, I could no longer use this in stand-alone mode.

As a last resort I decided to un-install and re-install.
This had to be done through Wave Central (due to a cached password, refused me to log in to Wave Central)

To try reset I hit the clear all function, which then lost all my license information, and still refused me to login.

At that point I could not use any of the instrument, without the needed licences, and no way to login Waves Central.
Lost 5 days arsing about, and $77 wasted on a product I could no longer use. A frustrating waste of time.
God-smacked how something seemly so good, could be so poorly thought out for end users.

A pity really, because the sounds (when I had them working) were not too bad. Maybe not the best on the market, but for the price certainly usable. But as an experience, stay away and shop somewhere else. Pay the higher price and get a better more well thought out product....

There is a reason this product is so much cheaper than anything else in its "class". The articulations of this plugin are limited because not enough recording time was used to cover each area (sustain, decay, etc.). It didn't cost much, so lesson learned. I will not, however, purchase anything else from this plugin developer, as the demo video is misleading, at best.

While the sounds are decent, there is a polyphony issue where playing new notes will cut off the ring of sustained notes. I have never experienced this issue with higher end products like Keyscape, and all of the Native Instruments pianos. It renders the product unusable for most recording applications.

Just not right for me? Give me a break. That's what Sweetwater uses on their star rating for 1 star. It's like the don't believe there are any bad products but only a bad fit. That's an insult to my intelligence and probably anyone else like me.

But the product is the real culprit here. I have an I7 with loads of RAM. It's a brand new processor, memory, and motherboard running Windows10 and Protools 12. I'm using a M-Audio Code61 keyboard.

First I can play the miniGrand that comes with protools without incident. It works well and I can get a good feel, good response, and great sound considering that I've never played any non-virtual -- real -- mini-grand, not even a steinway that sounds as good as the mini grand that protools supplies with PT10.

So I install the Grand Rhapsody and that's not easy. After many iterations and messing around I finally got it to play. But after tweaking for a couple hours I cannot get a decent response from it. The volume of each note is completely random. Playing one note is loud, two notes together is unbelievably quiet. Sometimes you hit a key and it's "rip your ears off" loud but all the notes leading up and after are super soft.

Next week tech support. All the time that it takes to figure this out if it even can be fixed makes it a very expensive choice -- not a bargain at any price. Even if it was free I've already lost irrecoverable time (several hours). Not impressed. This was my first purchase from Waves. Will not be buying any more Waves products. No protools plugin has ever created more than a few minutes trouble. This is ridiculous.

This software has to be the worst I've ever used of any kind of software. It's not my machine, everything runs great on it. I have installed 4 times and Grand Rhapsody will not show up. It took almost 3 hours to get the ridiculous waves central program downloaded and installed, it errored several times. Then it took an hour to get it to install the plugins i bought from Waves and only one shows up. the piano hasn't shown after 4 install attempts. It took 2 installs to get it on another computer and the sound is not bad, until you change presets and sit there for minutes waiting for it to load, change back to a sound you've already loaded? Same thing. This would be unusable live and would certainly ruin a good grove when recording, waiting on it. The effects are very poor, It calls delay a reverb. Again the piano sound is not bad, just very disappointed in the usability of it.

I have an Intel i7 processor with plenty of ram, 64 bit and so on. The program as advertised on this website and through the Waves company shows compatibility. Beware, the program refused to install for me and gave me an error message stating the processor was incompatible. There is absolutely no reason that the plug in would not install. So...obviously it does not completely work as advertised for all PC systems. This is a gamble and you might not get your money back if the program makes you register the product before actual installation!