PIANO V3 Review
I didn’t plan on reviewing this plugin, but I’ve realized it is one of my most used plugins. Piano V3 is Arturia’s acoustic piano plugin. As for sound design, pianos are a great source of timbre for effects and offer a wide range of tones when creating new experimental sounds. Saw waves can often times be so simple and harmonically rich, that distortions don’t quite reveal their quality. My main use of Piano V3 is as a sound source for making effects presets and effects demos.
It’s a simple universally recognizable starting point that showcases the quality of the effect very well. I do usually showcase other sound sources as well, but I’ve taken to always trying to provide a piano. Pianos tend to be bright enough to reveal filter motion and granular textures, while being soft enough to reveal distortion and other harmonic effects.
But why do I use this one? First of all, if I’m not mistaken, Piano V3 doesn’t use samples, all the sounds are synthesized with physical modeling, which means you are far less likely to hear those subtle details that can repeat with sampled pianos.This also means there’s a bit of control over the tone as well. I tend to just use some of the presets, but you can change the decay time, age, and other settings. Most of all, it just seems to work, I also have the standalone version in my hot bar for practicing piano (which I clearly don’t do enough).
The advanced tab in Piano V3 gives you a bit more control than other sample based pianos. The hammer hardness, dynamics, position and release time allow you to craft soft “felt” style pianos or really hard and bright pianos. String Age and tuning allow you to mimic old dusty uncared for and abandoned pianos. Finally you get a mixer for the various mechanical noises that an acoustic piano will produce.
Over all, there’s likely nothing particularly special about this piano, or maybe there is. I’m sure piano and keyboard experts will have better information on which piano plugins sound best or reproduce acoustic dynamics best. For me, this is just a simple means to an ends that gets the exact job done that I’m looking for. I use it so much I figured I’d review it, I don’t think it has ever crashed on me or caused any problems either.