The story
Fazioli’s Crown Jewel with Audience and Player VR perspectives.
***UPDATE April 2024: If you love this and my other pianos, check out the UPGRADED versions of them at:
I guess I’m old school. When I starting my sampling journey with Pianobook in 2020, I really liked the idea of preserving a piano’s character, telling its story, and sharing its sound. Since then Pianobook has evolved into a comprehensive resource of sonic textures that go well beyond acoustic instruments. While I love all of them, I always return to my bread and butter – the pianos.
So I present The Experience Fazioli F308. The Fazioli F308 is a concert grand that extends more than 10 feet, and is almost twice as long as my personal piano. The length of the bass strings become obvious when you play the lower octaves. Fazioli makes only 140 pianos per year, and the F308 is the crown jewel – the rarest of exceptional instruments.
This particular F308 is owned by a friend of mine and it, of course, has an interesting story. Delivered about 3-4 years ago, it was supposed to have Paolo Fazioli’s signature. But when it arrived, the signature was missing. About a year later, around the same time as the NAMM show in Los Angeles, Paolo Fazioli went to his house, played some Chopin on it and then signed it for him.
Technical Stuff:
* Audience and Player Perspectives using 10 microphones
* Ambisonic VR routing
* 5 Velocity Layers
* Half Pedaling
I’ve updated the Experience series with multiple microphone angles and a new ambisonic/virtual reality workflow. There are two microphone groups:
The first is the Audience Perspective, which are a pair of hand built U87 clones placed over the soundboard and a pair of C214’s placed XY about a meter away. Mix and reverb to taste.
The second is the Player Perspective, with my new ambisonic array of 3 XY pairs. These can be enjoyed in two ways: the first is to simply mix the 3 XY pairs. But the real virtual reality experience can be had if you place the 6 microphone perspectives with ambisonic plugins and control the soundspace using head tracking. I’ll provide a video on how to do this. Note that the player perspective is provided totally dry without any reverb. This is because dry samples are needed before ambisonic processing – reverb changes as you move your head, so you need the dry signal. See video on setup, and also check out this software that can help with the head tracking with your webcam!
https://github.com/blah1898/the-experience-face-tracker
The microphone angles are organized differently depending on platform. For Kontakt, which supports 6 channel output, there is one file for Audience and one file for Player. For SFZ, which don’t support 6 channel output, there are five total files. The first is the standard Audience perspective, which is a mix of the close and room mics. The Player perspective contains four files. The first Player perspective is a mixdown of all 3 mic pairs. The final three files are the separate stereo head angles that can be mixed using the IEM plugin suite, which can help make a VR experience through ambisonics.
Special thanks to the beta testers who helped me from PianoWorld and PianoClack.
The Experience - Fazioli F308 Intro
The Experience - Fazioli F308 Ambisonic Setup
Interface
Reviews for The Experience – Fazioli F308
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Beautifully done
Beautiful sampling of a spectacular instrument. The 5 velocity layers really make this perfect for emotive playing (or programming in my case; my playing isn't that good!). The stereo placement is lovely too, much more detailed than my go-to piano from NI. Excellent effort and thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Wonderful piano
What a gem... Wonderful second volume of the Experience Series. Keep them coming.
Used the Kontakt version, but not ventured yet with the binaural setting. Another time.What a Lovely Instrument.
I wanted to personally thank you for releasing this software. Where I live we have little to no access to grand pianos, mustless a Fazioli.
Just played your software Fazioli for the first time. I loved it. You made my day.
Instantly thought of the words from the the book "the Name of the Wind" and how the main character described his instrument. I'll find the quote and post it but it was beautiful.
Keep up the good work. Piano is an experience that we should all be so lucky to have access to and you my friend is making this a reality
Cheers.
What you have done is remarkable. You captured the character of the piano and shared it with us allHere’s that quote: The Main Character of the book describing his instrument.
"It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.” - Patrick Rothfuss
Patrick Rothfuss - Name of the Wind.
My Best Free Piano
There is a Lot of free Piano around the Internet, and by far this is my Favorite.
An absolutely amazing sample library
The sound is beautiful and I'm a pretty big fan of what you did with the player/audience perspectives. I only have on problem with it(I'm using the the SFZ version). For some reason, the C#6 (or C#5, I can't remember) triggers at a slightly different time then the rest of the notes. This results in the chords I use it in sounding like they are being rolled. If there is anyway to fix this, it would turn this already perfect piano into something even better. Another thing I love about it is how effectively it runs on my computer. I'm using a fairly outdated computer hardware wise and no matter what I do to this piano (reverb, volume, a large amount of notes played at once, playing the notes faster, what ever settings are available really) it runs perfectly. I'm very used to hearing the sounds of the piano clip when there is too many notes being played (usually ~6-7 notes at once) or if any reverb is added. This ran perfectly. Also a fan of the detune settings (but I'm not sure if that is built in or if it is a SFZ feature). Thanks for the amazing sample library.
