Plugsound Vol. 1: Keyboards

Hmm. In many ways this Plugsound edition is great. It's easy to audtition sounds, tweeking possibilities aren't too bad, and some of the sounds, particularly the pianos, are beautiful.

My main grumble, though, (apart from the bloody authorizing shenanigans) is the distinct lack of velocity layers. Some of the pianos appear to have as many as three or four (wow...!) but others, especially the (rather muddy) electric pianos, seem to have a rather pathetic two. This is a great shame, as it makes playing very dificult, as only a small variation in playing velocity can make the sound leap from one layer to another - from a very pleasant jazz piano, for example, to the kind of clanging staccato that you'd only expect if you were hamering away at it.

No amount of tweeking in Plugsound or Cubase seems to resolve the problem. This is a great shame as, given that it effects all the sounds, and some worse than others, it makes the whole thing feel somewhat cheap and nasty, as if velocity layers had never been invented, and given the price of the plugsound packages (I have the Fretted version too) is really quite dissappointing.

While there are many good sounds here the whole thing is cheapened by the lack of subtlety, and for this reason I wouldn't urge anyone to rush out and buy the fretted or keyboard modules. A shame.

For its acoustic piano set, this VSTI is excellent. The Rock Piano 3 and the Jazz Piano are my favorites (with some tweaking), although I'm now editing some of the others and like them more and more. (There's a dropdown menu called Best of Plugsound, but to my ear the instruments on this list aren't the best sounds.)

Sounds very good around middle C and everywhere. Great for both rhythm and lead.

My only real hesistation is over the interface: you can edit zones, but you can't see what zone you're editing: you have to press a key in the zone you want to edit, then make the edits. The problem is that since the pianos are well-sampled, the split points aren't always self-evident to the ear (thankfully), so there's a little too much guesswork, at first, in editing. In fact the problem gets magnified as you edit the pianos to your liking, since the split points get less and less evident, and you can't SEE what changes you've made, so you risk overwriting the edits you made last week.

A revision to the software that lets us see the breakpoints might be asking too much right now, but it would be nice if Plugsound put a map of all the instruments' breakpoints on their site (hint, hint). I requested such a map from Plugsound two months ago. Received a message saying it was being passed on to their developers. Never heard a word after this. Also had a reinstall problem after an unrelated virus deleted my Windows directory. Asked what I should do. Never heard from them. I was able to figure it out myself (just re-enter the challenge response), but it would have been nice to hear from someone.

But it seems that I'm emphasizing the bad aspects of the program. The good aspect is the piano sounds: a good variety of excellent pianos, many with longish samples (7-8 seconds before the loop), good effects, and ADSR control of both amp and the filters. It's my default instrument in my sequencer.

AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS PLAYING THIS PLUGIN:
I'll add that the sound still impresses me but:
1. A genuine pp\soft layer would be good to have.
2. You can't control the filters with velocity. In other words, you can't apply a low pass filter to softer velocities. Very strange.
3. The lower notes were a little muddy until I reduced the volume on the bass samples.
4. There's a little fuzz around the E 2 octaves above middle C on the Acoustic Grand patch. Very noticable if you sustain it and play it more than once.