The story
R³ stands for “(a) Ridiculous (amount of) Round Robin”.
I recently made a few attempts to program an electric piano on the synthesizer, starting from the basic sine-through-a-volume-envelope structure.
Then I made a few variations while switching instruments and adding to each of them its unique treatment in the form of tape saturation, tremolo and autopan.
The results were 30 similar yet different electric pianos.
So, why not sampling all of them, create a group for each variation and load all the 30 groups inside Kontakt in Round Robin?
The result is surely inelegant, inconsistent and inefficient, up to the limit of usability.
But each time you press a key or hold a chord there’s something fascinating – at least to me – in its inner unpredictability.
Reviews for R³ Electric Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Once you're past the setup issues, it's actually a great library
Sigh... this sample library has the double whammy of having been saved with absolute sample paths and having a special character in the filename of the .nkr file, so you not only have to point the .nki to the samples folder, but then you also have to manually locate the .nkr. Even after you accomplish those two things, the impulse response files are completely missing, so you can't reconnect them. It's a great lesson to everyone in the PB community that we should find a trusted friend to share our libraries with to beta test before submitting them. The concept of this library is interesting: there are 30 electric piano sounds, and they are chosen at random as you play. The result is not as chaotic as you might think it would be. It's pretty rich and wonderful, which makes it even more sad that this library has so many problems. My only concern about this is that because the different samples are triggered at random, it may cause problems for those of us who need repeatability later on. If I were to use this in a track, I'd definitely want to bounce the audio so I'd get the same thing every time.
I should be angry for the way its developer handled the file formatting, but...
...IT'S TOO CUTE!!!
Beautiful but with a VERY big release
This instrument offers very lovely and nicely coloured sounds that you might really be interested in. My problem is that the release in some is so damn high even with the two effects included are completely off. This can result in the high notes producing some very harsh frequencies that will definitely need to be tuned in the mix.
The setup process was a little annoying though, since you have to assing every patch with the n3.nkr file. DO NOT select the same-named .nki, since you will get a broken GUI. This problem might be because of the special exponential character in the filename. Try not to use those in your files please! I The file "Cab - British.wav" is compeltely missing though, but the instrument works fine without it.
Worth the setup process
This is a very cool sounding library, the sounds are very clean and give off kind of retro, SNES vibes. However, this is a frustrating pack to use, simply because for each of the 9 .nki files, you have to manually route the samples and .nkr files each time, and on top of that, there are .wav files missing. For reviewing purposes, this became rather tedious, but if you only have to do it once or twice per project, it's not going to be that annoying. I think I'll be using this on a future project, but would appreciate if the routing errors could potentially be fixed and the Cab .wav files added to the download.
This piano is not for me
The R³ Electric Piano has some setup issues, and it can be difficult to get it to work properly. Once I was able to get it working, I was disappointed with the sound. The instrument is fun to play around with for a bit, but it is not very inspirational and unpractical. Most of the sounds are good, but they are lost in a sea of round robin.
