Piano:
Scheps Omni Channel 2 (Waves Audio)
– TLDR Notes:
This does it all – Nice filters, 4 ‘preamp’ saturation choices, EQ and different types of compression to choose from.
Also has a De-esser which can be used as a “De-harsher” on instruments.
– Review:
I like the idea of getting the basic sound of say a grand piano right with just one plugin wherever possible, and Scheps Omni Channel delivers the right balance of options and ease of use for that.
Some plugins may offer EQ and saturation, but when they do it’s often only one type of saturation, or it may not be implemented that well. Even if you get a plugin which happens to have good EQ and saturation quality, you’ll still have to load at least one extra compressor plugin to be able to quickly shoot out different compression styles.
When Grammy-winning mixer Andrew Scheps teamed up with Waves Audio to create the Scheps Omni Channel, the goal was clearly to create something that not only had a variety of features, but also something that was very intuitive to use.
I think the intuitive quality is a key factor that makes this one a joy to work with. I don’t find myself searching for functions, the layout is logical and well-thought-out.
When I first loaded an instance of Omni I was a bit worried this would be super heavy on the system, as it took a couple of extra seconds to load. But I discovered that once I had loaded the first instance, the following instances loaded very swiftly after that.
One of the reasons I love this thing on piano, has to do with the nature of the piano as an instrument and specifically its role in a mix versus say a lead vocal.
A lead vocal and a grand piano are similar in that they are pretty wide ranging frequency-wise, but in most songs the Lead vocal needs a certain high end sweetness, and if it’s a male vocalist, a sense of weight to the low end retained even through a decent amount of compression that is often required on vocal.
With a piano in a full mix, you usually don’t want the lows of the left hand to be too weighty and heavy, as that will competes with the bass and kick in a different way than the occasional tonal dip of a lead vocal.
That means that there are difference requirements of a compressor for piano than a lead vocal.
I don’t consider state of the art “low end retention”, characteristic of great analog compressors, an absolute must when compressing a piano, as the low end needs to be a little bit on the smaller side to fit in a full mix usually, and the compressors offered here are top notch for the purpose of instruments like piano, guitar and synths.
It’s also important to have a plugin with a good filter on a piano, which you get with the option of some great ‘6’ ’12”18′ and ’24’ – dB-per-octave filters here.
So what about Reverb? If this is an “all in one” solution for piano, where is the all important reverb to avoid that weird, completely dry piano that seems out of place with the rest of the track?
While it doesn’t offer an onboard reverb, the Omni Channel has an insert point, which lets you insert any VST3 you want, not just from Waves either.
You can simply load a reverb you like in the insert point and safe it as a preset in your DAW.
Of course you can also load any other type of effect, as long as its VST3.
One last thing I’ll mention is the fact that the saturation on this plugin is very good and highly useful, and you can choose between “Odd”, “Even” “Heavy” and “Crush”.
Although for general piano application you might not reach for “Crush” that often, the additional saturation mode that was added to version 2 of Omni Channel, but it’s great to have an aggressive distortion option available for general purpose mixing.
As always, if saturation quality is important to you, and if you have the option to oversample plugins in your DAW (Not to mention can live with the CPU hit), I recommend oversampling the plugin for the best result.
Jam-Aha-Timbre (Henry Olonga)
– TLDR Notes:
The captured resonance of a Yamaha grand piano.
The image is the “half ” program, meaning the piano lid is half closed, using Reaper’s mix knob to blend it in, in this case mixed in 20 %.
Can be found in N4 Finder under HO>Ambiances(AMB)>YMA(YMA)
– Review:
This is one of those tricks Nebula has up its sleeve; It’s the sampled resonance of a Yamaha Grand.
Henry Olonga is legendary for the amount of work he did and his firm belief in the sonic benefits of Nebular technology, which resulted in him sampling a ton of gear.
His “All You Can Eat” collection has gems like this one.
You can find it in the Ambiance category in his collection, using the N4 Finder.
The trick is to blend it in with your piano sound. You can do that by putting this on a separate track and then send the original piano to it so you now have a parallel track with its own fader, or if your DAW has a mix knob like Reaper you can simply use that function.
Lifeline Console (Excite Audio)
– TLDR Notes:
This console is an easy way to add good sounding subtle imperfections to piano or pads, by just using the cassette under “Mod” and setting it to something low like 1.8.
This usually works very well at the pictured settings.
It also has 2 other mod options; tape and vinyl.
An advantage of Lifetime Console is that can also do other kinds of tone-shaping at the same time, like some handy overall EQ, it has a preamp function to add subtle harmonic distortion (with 3 different color modes; bright, warm, dark) and a compressor (3 different types; analogue, transparent, variable).
– Review:
The two main things I like about this ‘console’ is that you can use it effectively right away without having read anything about it, but at the same time it offers value under the hood, making a closer inspection a sound investment.
One of the biggest flaws of sampled pianos is the lack of flaws.
That’s why I really like plugins that offer nice sounding fluctuations and imperfections to the clean strident nature of sampled pianos.
And one of my main requirements for such a plugin is an ability to be dialed in very subtly.
Essentially I’m looking for a degree of tonal modulation that isn’t prominent enough to make the listener feel drunk or even mildly intoxicated. In fact, I don’t want anyone to even notice that it’s there as an effect, but once the effect is bypassed the music ‘feels’ less good, in other words you miss the effect once it’s muted.
For this, I like the Mod section of Lifeline Console, specifically the ‘Cassette’ mode but you can also try out the two other options; vinyl and tape.
It all fits under the umbrella Excite Audio refers to as ‘Nostalgic Pitch Warping’, which I think is a pretty good term for it.
In addition to ‘Mod’, a separate section is dedicated to ‘Wear’. ‘Wear’ is old-school imperfection via noise, artifacts and unpredictable nature of tape, vinyl and cassette.
These are some of the things you can do to sampled pianos to make it feel more real.
Other techniques is to add sampled resonance, or set up a couple of mics in the room to record the virtual piano coming out of the monitors then mix that under the piano.
I like how Lifeline Console allows you to drag the different modular sections freely and arrange them how you like.
The compressor section offers “Analogue”, “Transparent” and Variable modes. On a piano in general, if compression is needed at all I find that a little bit of compression goes a long way.
With “Transparent” mode you get a clean, modern compression you might want to check out subtly on piano, with the purpose of catching the peaks without sacrificing body of the sound.
One of the “under the hood” elements is that the compressors offer offers Mid/Side and Left/Right functionality as well as Auto-Makeup control, two welcome features.
RC-20 Retro Color (XLN Audio)
– TLDR Notes:
Really nice for piano in modern music for the type of lo-fi’ing you often hear on modern sounds.
“Wobble & Flutter” for adding pitch inconsistencies.
Has nice reverb (“Space”) for piano.
– Review:
The irony of XLN’s RC-20 Retro Color is that despite having Retro in its name, it’s an extremely modern plugin that proves most effectively, in my opinion, in modern styles where you need a certain type of lo-fi sound.
A favorite of people like Finneas (Billie Eilish) and Charlie Puth, the greatest strength of RC-20 Retro Color is not sounding as authentically analog as algorithmically possible, but rather the ability to quickly add lo-fi vibe by messing up the sound source in a way that results in an immediately recognizable, characteristic modern sound.
The plugin is split into easy-to-understand modules, and the layout Is easy on the eyes and intuitive.
For pads and piano this plugin is a gem for its modulation qualities via “Wobble & Flutter”, a great feature for adding pitch inconsistencies, and the “Magnetic” module is the volume modulation side of things that mimics that characteristic of old analog tape.
When looking at the various modules one might wonder what a module named “Digital” is doing in a retro color plugin like this.
A closer look revels that “Digital” again is a type of degradation of the sound source, as it mimics the sound of vintage digital hardware such as samplers, where part of the distinct character came from the sample rate and bit rate limitations of the day.
“Distort” is exactly that, a way to distort the audio, although you can also use it for milder tube saturation emulation. This module actually contains six different types of saturation familiar to users of Addictive Drums 2 and Addictive Keys like “Tube” and “Transformer.”
Extra points to XLN Audio for the inclusion of a nice little reverb, the “Space” module, that while not packed with features do offer the most important ones you want in a reverb for things like piano, including pre-delay control and the ability to high and low cut. The inclusion of the “Space” module means that you have the bulk, if not all of the needed piano processing within a single plugin.
Helios 69 EQ / Titan V2 (Henry Olonga)
– TLDR Notes:
Really nice EQ especially for acoustic instruments including pianos.
Great high end (10 k shelf) on a piano.
– Review:
Henry Olonga sampled the Helios Type 69 console module equipped with the highly regarded original Lustraphone transformers and gave the Nebula user-base one of its absolute favorites; the Titan 2.
The instance pictured above uses the azzimov skin.
It has stepped controls, so this is not a surgical fine-tuning device, rather it’s a tool where boosting sounds great, and makes you commit to choices that actually make a difference, and maybe we could all use a little more of that in the digital age.
The high end is very sweet on this for grand piano, and you get a high band a 10 kHz (right) where you can go with either the mic input version of the line input version.
A downside is that this library is not quite as user-friendly as it appears at first glance, as you can’t do more than one thing at a time. For instance if you use the low-cut filter you can’t boost, unless you load additional instances of N4 with the library. So I usually only use it to boost a certain frequency, typically mids or highs.
Although I’m not personally a big preset guy when it comes to EQ and preamps plugins like this one, Titan 2 offers a nice selection of presets if you want some suggestions and inspiration, including a piano section.
Using the azzimov skin, click “Edit” in N4 to access the presets page. This “Quick mix” menu contains the following piano-specific presets:
“Bright”, “Cutting”, “Fat”, Hi-def”, “Honky”, “Present”, “Thin”, “Warm”, “Warm Biting” and “Woody”.
PCM 70 Ver 2 (STN)
– TLDR Notes:
One of the Lexicon PCM 70 version 2 classics; “Concert Hall”.
Great on piano. Low cut + predelay = 20 ms.
– Review:
A completely dry piano can seem out of place in a mix and feel like it’s missing shine and cohesion. So what options are tried-and-true when it comes to acoustic pianos? Both plates and halls are very popular choices, but I would say a good concert hall often lends itself particularly well to grand piano.
The iconic Lexicon PCM 70 Digital Reverb from 1985 had one of the best sounding concert halls for great piano, used for that application by people like Bob Clearmountain who slightly modified the the standard Concert Hall preset for use on pianos.
My hardware PCM 70 is in need of a battery replacement, but with a good impulse pack like the ones from STN you don’t have to worry about such issues. Convolution technology using impulses is a great way to get the authentic tone of the sampled hardware.
The hardware does have a couple of advantages over impulses however, the most obvious one being the lack of modulation in the impulse versions, as this is an inherent limitation of the technology. So if you want time related modulation you can do a version of that by adding tools such as RC-20 Retro Color or Lifeline Console (reviewed earlier) after the convolution reverbs.
The Lexicon PCM 70 Version 2 impulses from STN do sound great and are extremely affordable, a terrific addition for anyone looking for nicely sampled classic clean reverbs sans modulation.
If you’re looking for a versatile convolution reverb plugin that lets you load impulses, comes with features like EQ and Predelay as well as set of terrific reverb impulses I highly recommend the free Convology XT:
https://impulserecord.com/cvxt-download/