The latest attempt to bring the electric piano into the digital age comes from Canadian software house Applied Acoustic Systems. It didn't sound too bad to me (although it found less favour with Gordon Reid - see SOS December 2001 or but at its current UK price of around a thousand pounds, it's beyond the reach of many musicians. Emagic's EVP88 virtual instrument has won a lot of praise from Logic users for its physically modelled Rhodes and Wurli emulations (see review in SOS July 2001, or at ), but the company's policy of not porting the full versions of their instruments to open standards such as VST means that users of other sequencers have to make do with the severely cutdown VST-compatible EVP73 (reviewed SOS December 2001, or at Meanwhile, in the hardware field, Clavia have launched the ambitious Nord Electro, a digital keyboard devoted to reproducing electromechanical pianos and tonewheel organs. The last year or so has seen a couple of more serious attempts to reproduce the electric piano sound in a form that's easier to integrate into a modern studio environment. When manufacturers did include a Rhodes patch in their electronic pianos, it often seemed like an afterthought. Some players of the real thing were also used to tweaking the sound of their instruments using laborious methods such as adjusting the position of the pickups, which nobody ever bothered to render in sampled renditions. As well as being fully polyphonic, a Rhodes or Wurli has a sound that varies considerably with keyboard velocity, from soft, rounded bell-like tones to clangorous 'thunks'. Indeed, electromechanical pianos have always been difficult to reproduce using samples. The factors that made them go out of fashion in the first place haven't gone away - they're still big and heavy, they still haven't got MIDI, and they still only have one patch - but it seems that players want the sound, and prefer not to make do with sampled substitutes. These days, the wheel has turned full circle, and even the tattiest examples fetch hundreds on the second-hand market. But of course, theirs isn't the only one around.Īt the height of the DX7's popularity in the '80s, you couldn't give away a Fender Rhodes or a Wurlitzer EP200.
Applied Acoustic Systems, known best for their Tassman software synth, have now used their modelling technology to create an electric piano plug-in.
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