Native Instruments The Grandeur Grand Piano Software Instrument Reviews

Native has always been good and this is no exception, it's a good plugin

I'm an amateur hobby composer and primarily use a piano. The one that came with AbletonLive lacks expressive range. The Grandeur has that in spades! It has rich depth and texture and is a pure joy to play. Its value to me is far more than the cost. It makes me sound better than I am. Online ordering and downloading was quick and easy. Thanks for offering such an excellent quality product. Your service is tops!

This is about 96% of my ideal piano, a nice attack without sounding harsh and metallic, lots of nice sustain and resonance, but not echoey. It sounds, in fact, like a Steinway D in great condition (probably a coincidence, I haven't read the manual).

The Basic Grandeur preset is a great balanced starting point. I usually turn down the noises (hammer, damper, pedal, strings) to just barely audible, set the overtones to about 2 o'clock. And then I lose track of time, because it makes me want to play.

I like the Color control - it seems to let you skew the playback of the samples so that you get the softer or harder samples, but still with dynamics and volume as expected. In small amounts, this can change you from softer to brighter. In large amounts, it gets unrealistic, but maybe useful if you're into ambient or clangey sounds.

The EQ, compression, low keys controls, reverb, compression, etc., are great for playing, if you are willing to use your ears. If you need to know what you're doing, numbers or knob-wise relative to traditional processing equipment,leave them off and use other plug-ins in your DAW or performance software. You can definitely dial in a great sound for almost any situation with the included tweakables, but you have to use your ears and get used to the controls.

I have a Roland FA-08 at home, and play a RD-2000 at church. I used to play a Yamaha P-155. This sounds much richer to me than the presets on any of those boards. If I A/B with the FA-08 (any of the FA-08's presets or my own edits), it sounds much more detailed, sweeter, less "gritty", much better sustain. It's like going from standard high-definition to 4K, with the same headphones, all through the FA-08 as the audio interface.

It is very good at sounding "together" and natural, not like you're just triggering samples (when fairly close to the basic sound, at least). Clustered low notes are easier to hear. All the notes sound articulate. I used to have access to a mid-level Yamaha grand in good condition that I played a lot. This is the best thing I've played since then (maybe better, since that piano is probably a bit better in memory than it was in life).

I haven't found a way to make it really dry (like sitting in the playing position, with the piano in a dead room). The samples seem to include some natural reverb from wherever it was recorded. To me, it sounds natural and useful, but if you need a very dry close-mic'ed piano sound, this may be frustrating.

It comes with 18 presets ("snapshots", visible when you click the camera icon) that show most of the range of what it can do. You can save your own.

I already had the UVI Model D piano plug-in (free with something, maybe my Audiobox interface?) which sounds jangly and laggy to me compared to this. Once you've played this, you can't even force yourself to play the Garageband Steinway for more than half a minute.

I'm using a Roland FA-08 (love the action), on a Mac Mini (8 gigs, Apple M1 chip) running Studio One 5. Once I set the buffer fairly low it plays great with no lag or issues. If you're a piano player, I do think you want a good controller for this, hammer-action if possible - trying to play it with a springy unweighted controller was not very satisfying. And you want a good pair of headphones. Or good monitors.

This is spoiling me for piano sounds, especially compared to hardware keyboards.

Best one I have used so far.

These piano sounds are very crisp and pristine. Just like the real thing!

this may be a good choice. I don't own this but am glad the demo was available to hear. As a person that grew up with a real grand piano and I also use one in the recording studio I record at, it is my opinion that Play's Bosendorfer, ARIA Player's Concert D Grand Piano and Wave's Grand Rhapsody Piano are a lot more realistic sounding. Mic positions can make a huge difference and many people only mic left, right and sometimes at the rear of the piano. Some mic settings in the Waves piano add a mic behind the pianist to give an additional voicing of how you hear it when playing. I just feel this makes for a better sound. Overall to me this piano sounded reverbed even up close.

I'm in the software business, and most of the software written today, especially in the music realm, is pretty good. So if you're going to compete you should at least write SW that meets the baseline expectation of being intuitive. I know that's a dangerous statement, because being in the SW business I know what is intuitive to one person is not intuitive to another. But - if you follow paradigms that get used by similar SW to do the same thing, that's at least a start.

After battling for some time just to get the program installed, and having to go to help forums to understand what to do when it would not install (as opposed to release notes distributed with the product), I then could not get the presets to load. This set me off on a multi day excursion with google, youtube, other friends who use Kontakt, till I finally find the NI support page which tells me to click the camera icon so I can load presets. Yes, the camera icon.

This reminds me of why I haven't used Kontakt that much in the first place. I've purchased other sample libraries that run standalone and I also use in mainstage/logic and haven't had this kind of trouble. And documentation supplied with the product told me what to do.

So if you're new to the Kontakt ecosystem - have fun figuring it out. Hopefully it will be worth the effort.