Scarbee E.E.P.

PRICE: EUR 109.00 CATEGORY: Vintage Keyboards FORMAT: Kontakt 1.5.3/ 2.11 HALion 3.1 EXS24 mk II MEDIA: 1 DVD SIZE: 1.5 GB BUY NOW: Multi Format Edition

Scarbee E.E.P. (Edgy Electric Piano) has a dynamic and versatile sound and tends more towards an 'edgier' sound. Certainly, it can deliver a 'soft and sweet' tone, but its light action allows players to easily deliver a performance with more 'bite'.

Screenshot from Kontakt 2.11 version.

Click here to see a full sized screenshot.

How much detail is there in the instrument? In order to accurately reproduce the dynamics of the original keyboard, both the sustained and release sounds of each of the 64 keys has been sampled at 16 different velocities – resulting in a total pool of over 2000 24 bit wav files. All samples are full length and unlooped and we also recorded 'release' samples for each of the 16 velocities, at the exact same level as the corresponding 16 sustain samples. (except those for the top 5 keys which have no damper, causing the keys to ring out to their end).

Although the original instrument is a small piano, the project undertaken to reproduce it in software has been huge. Prior to the commencement of two months of recordings, a painstaking process of restoration lasting six months was undertaken. This involved a range of measures aimed at creating a 'super' piano which has perhaps the highest signal to noise ratio of any yet produced. Sources of noise and distortion, such as the power transformer, were made external to the piano and audio-critical components were updated with higher quality versions wherever possible.

The E.E.P. was recorded at 24 bit resolution through a Mindprint En-Voice preamp (without any use of EQ, tube saturation or compression), and then digitally transferred to a Nuendo AudioLink 96 audio card.

The E.E.P. exhibits a high degree of ‘characterful’ timbral variation in the forte area of its dynamics. The piano’s action is very light, making it easy for a keyboardist to play continuously in this range of the piano’s timbre. In order to capture such a defining element of the piano’s personality, Thomas decided to increase the size of the sampling project by 30%, with additional focus on the forte range of the instrument. Once this was accomplished, a proprietary system was employed to ensure that the sampler’s response to velocity variation was identical to the original keyboard’s keyboard action.

To accommodate systems with RAM limitations, several ‘Lite’ versions of the piano are included. Lite versions contain the samples of the white keys, which are stretched down a semitone to cover adjacent black keys. (3 black keys were kept as they were the last of a reed type).

Why did we go to this much trouble?
Technology is moving at an increasing pace, with music companies releasing new (almost disposable) instruments every day, but still many of us find ourselves looking to the past for sounds which truly inspire us. Organic tones with inconsistencies and chameleon-like character flaws which are very difficult to programme into predictable digital instruments. However, the original keyboard is electro-mechanical and infamously difficult to maintain. The light action often results in the piano being played quite hard, which leads to cracked reeds, electrical short circuits and tuning problems. Finding a source of the reeds is itself a monumental task in some countries, and using a soldering iron to tune your piano isn’t anyone’s idea of a fun break before the gig. It won’t be long before it’s simply not practical to maintain fragile instruments like the this, let alone tour with them. To date several sample libraries have included limited attempts to describe this keyboard in software, but only recently has the very technology which is making the beloved keyboard obsolete supplied the tools we require to ‘capture the soul of the beast’.

With the Scarbee E.E.P musicians will have access to the inspirational sounds of this classic electric piano for generations to come – vintage sonic lightning preserved in a cutting-edge software bottle.

Features:
· 1.7 GB multisampled content with full decay and no loops
· 2.914 individual samples
· Includes both a 16 bit and a 24 bit version.
· Instrument graphics for KONTAKT 2.11
· Ultra realistic sound and feel
· Original Instrument Noise can be adjusted in level.
· This instruments has been carefully programmed so that it perfectly emulate the feel/volume of various key-zones of the original instrument.