Imperial Grand

My first moments playing the Imperial Grand3D were exciting and inspirational. It has a very clear responsive sound that appealed to me. The dynamics and overall feel playing it are excellent. It comes with eight presets and eight slots for user presets as well as a separate 3D effect for those of you with surround sound.

Imperial Grand3D uses a combination of physical modeling, samples and synthesis which gives it the sound and feel of playing a real piano. In my opinion it does this very well.

The user interface looks good. It has a good color scheme that is easy on the eyes and is quite easy to read. There are seven sections for editing the sound to your liking as follows:

--Dynamics--
Here there are sliders to adjust both minimum and maximum volume to match your playing dynamics. There are ten choices of velocity curve and another slider to adjust the difference of volume at highest velocity between A0 and C8.

--Designs--
There is an overtone on/off button here which selects which harmonic is to be adjusted by the harmonic dial. The harmonic dial lets you find a darker or brighter sound to your liking. There is a staccato button as well which switches staccato mode on and off and a soft pedal slider for adjusting the amount of influence the soft pedal has on the volume. A release dial, ten choices of timbre curve, a dial called 'Board' for sustain and decay and a 'Lid' dial for for adjusting if the lid is open, closed or somewhere in between.

--Microphone positions--
Here there are three sliders. Close, Distant and Room. This section is also where you set your midi controllers for sustain pedal, sostenuto, soft pedal and staccato.

--Sympathetic Resonances--
This unique feature adds harmonies to pedal up and pedal down notes. There are five adjustment sliders in this section. One for the volume of the Sympathetic Resonance. Four for adjusting the volumes for each of the four harmonics and one for release volume of the tail sound.

--Hammer Actions--
This is an important part of creating a realistic piano. Besides having two sliders to adjust the amount of the hammer noise and the pedal noise, you also have three sliders to adjust the hammer hardness while you're playing soft, moderate or hard.

--Environment--
The environment is essentially a reverb section with eight reverb types. You have control over room size, damp, spatial, predamp, decay, diffusion, reverb type, spacial type and density.

--Tuning--
This allows you to choose tuning between 415Hz and 466Hz.

--3D--
Imperial Grand3D comes with a separate plugin for 7.1 surround sound. I did not have surround sound hardware to review this.

--My Thoughts--
I have compared this to other piano instruments in my arsenal and this one will be my 'go to' piano. With great realistic sound, responsive feel, lots of editing features and small footprint (147mb installer) I highly recommend trying out Imperial Grand3D if you're thinking of buying a piano.

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