**Only available to Students and Educational Establishments - Proof of educational status required**
The Grand 2 - The Ideal Concert Grand Piano
The Grand affords you an experience you’ll not soon forget - the jaw-dropping sound and inimitable feel of a high-quality concert grand piano. This VST instrument’s breathtaking authenticity and extraordinary dynamic response make it a must-have for every pianist. Make no mistake - it is the only alternative to a bona fide concert grand.
- Two top-flight concert grand pianos in one virtual instrument
- Utterly authentic piano sound that comes courtesy of two of the world’s finest, most expensive and rarest concert grands
- Full-length sustain samples, no loops, with every key sampled individually at varying velocities
- Unrivalled dynamic response
- Amazingly authentic sustain pedal resonance, damper and hammer emulations
Velocity adapts individually to suit your touch, style of play and keyboard’s response
- Powerful options for tweaking tone and variable room simulations
New Features
Based on The Grand, the venerable virtual repilication of real grand hailed far and wide, The Grand 2 is a step up the evolutionary ladder. For the new version of the virtual concert grand, Steinberg revamped the Playback Engine and optimized a score of the grand piano emulation’s decisive details to achieve an even more authentic sonic image and satisfyingly realistic feel. The Grand 2 now offers a second top-drawer concert grand, Surround support, and a host of functions for optimizing the processor load.
A Second Concert Grand - The Grand 2 features a second grand piano that adds a sonically rich option. The perfect complement to the original model, it was sampled, edited and processed with even greater painstaking effort. And this awesome quality makes is so much more than merely an encore. Though The Grand was everything players had been hoping for, the new model offers precisely the lush tonal alternative many had been dreaming of. You’re sure to find the perfect piano sound for your song in these two models.
New Playing Sounds - To put an even more faithful replication of a grand piano at your fingertips, The Grand now also offers incidental playing sounds such as key clicks and pedal noise – which you can add and subtract as desired.
Surround Hall - The integrated Ambience Hall now also offers four-channel support and lets you place the grand piano at any position in the virtual room.
RAMSave™ - With the benefit of RAMSaveTM, a process Steinberg had premiered in the software sampler HALion 3, you can make very efficient use of the host computer’s RAM. When RAMSaveTM is enabled, superfluous samples are automatically dumped from the main memory. That way, more RAM is available for other tasks and projects are loaded and saved so much faster. RAMSaveTM automatically scans the MIDI notes allocated to The Grand, dumping all unassigned samples from the RAM.
Enhanced Performance - The Grand 2 sports a fresh, new Audio Engine. Overhauled from the bottom up, it considerably enhances performance, particularly for disk streaming. The new Eco mode also helps lighten the computer’s load, which comes in especially handy when you’re composing.
Compatibility - The Grand 2 supports the prevailing plug-in formats VST, DXi and AU. It also integrates into Pro Tools®, courtesy of ReWire support. And with the standalone version, you can even use The Grand 2 without a host application.
If you make computer-assisted music and want the lush tone of a genuine concert grand, look no further - The Grand 2 is your first choice. The good news is that it sounds exactly like a world-class, handmade, perfectly intonated grand piano, the finest instrument money can buy. Better yet, it is affordable, easy to tote, fits in every apartment, and can be made part of every production without the technical skills and resources required to record the real thing. Painstakingly sampled in an anechoic room, the source material for The Grand comes courtesy of two of the world’s finest, rarest and surely most expensive concert pianos. Unlike a digital piano or a sampler, The Grand is not powered by looped samples, and it delivers natural full-length sustain and decay. For even greater authenticity, every key was sampled at many different velocities, faithfully capturing the full extent of every note’s decay. The result is a jaw-dropping VST instrument with mind-boggling dynamic response. Not only does it sound like a bona fide concert grand, it feels just like the real deal when you play.
Truly Natural Feel
The Grand is a lively, responsive instrument, highly sensitive to your touch and playing style. Featuring freely definable velocity curves and attack sensitivity, The Grand adapts to suit your keyboard and playing style. Aside from the keys, a pianist’s most important means of expression are the pedals. The Grand’s respond just like their counterparts on a real concert grand, and faithfully carry out every sustain and sustenuto pedal command.
Unrivalled Realism
The Grand 2 offers a variety of functions emulating acoustic grand pianos’ trademark response and adding distinctive incidental noises for an even more realistic grand piano sound. You can adjust these acoustical properties’ volume independently. You may even deactivate these functions if you wish, say to make The Grand sound like a digital piano.
- True Sustain Resonance - This is a very sophisticated feature on The Grand 2, which no sampler and only very few expensive digital pianos offer. A bit of background information helps to understand this function: When you play a note on an acoustic grand piano, only the damper of that key is raised, while all other strings remain dampened. If you step on the right (hold or sustain) pedal, the dampers are lifted from all the strings. Now when you strike a key, its string vibrations set the surrounding strings, sound board and housing vibrating sympathetically. This resonating tone is reminiscent of a long reverb tail. A concert piano like The Grand 2 would fall short of the real-deal mark if it didn’t also offer you this option.
- After-pedaling* - Discerning pianists are sure to welcome the option of after-pedaling*. Even if the sustain pedal is pressed after striking the keys, the undampened surrounding strings will still begin resonating.
- True String Release - When a key on a grand piano is released, the felt damper comes down the vibrating strings. This string action does not stop abruptly; they continue to vibrate for a moment. With the benefit of True String Release, The Grand does this too.
- True Hammer Release - When a key is released on an acoustic grand piano, the hammer returns to its initial position and generates a sound best described as low and woody. The pianist seated at the grand piano hears this sound very clearly, though, depending on microphone placement, it may be all but inaudible in recordings. If you want to hear that True Hammer Release, The Grand 2 will fulfill your wish.
- Key Sound - When you strike a key on a keyboard instrument, its action and mechanical components make a distinctive sound. Granted, it is soft and subtle, but certainly audible for any listener seated close to the grand piano.
- Damper Pedal Sound - With this option, you can add the faint, subtle sound of a damper pedal’s action to the sound of the dampened grand piano.
Tonal Variety
The Grand 2 comprises two expressive concert grands with very different fundamental sounds and unique tonal characters. For each piano, you have four sophisticated sound presets to choose from. They offer richly complex variations in volume and tonal response, and you are free to select the option that best suits the given musical genre and style of play.
- Natural - The grand piano plays and sounds like a real acoustic grand piano. This is the perfect choice for classical, jazz and all other musical scenarios requiring true sound and authentic feel.
Soft - Even if you pound the keys, the sound is dampened a tad more than with a real acoustic grand piano.
- Bright - Like with Soft, the dynamic response is normal in terms of volume, but the tone is brighter and more powerful - even when you play with a soft touch. Good for solo/melody lines and for accompanying electric / electronic instruments.
- Hard - The dynamic response of the instrument is limited to the extent that it sounds altogether more powerful and louder. The tone is also somewhat brighter than on a real grand. Great for conjuring punchy grand piano sounds typical of contemporary modern music styles.
Ambience
A grand piano is played in a room, and the sound of the room (called ambience) is a component part of an acoustic grand piano’s overall tone. What distinguishes The Grand 2 from virtually all digital pianos and sample libraries is that it lets you adjust the sound of the piano and the room ambience separately.
The Grand 2 was recorded an anechoic room, which is why it provides a true, unadulterated grand piano sound. You can shape the room in which this grand piano plays as you see fit - even in Surround sound, if you wish.
Tuning
Not only will The Grand 2’s tuning never drift under even the most extreme climatic conditions, you can also temper it or change its reference tuning with just a few clicks. The Grand 2 offers the standard tempered tuning option for when you want to accompany other tempered instruments in sweet harmony. You can also opt for grand concert piano tuning or “spread” tuning. A good piano tuner always tunes the instrument to concert grand scale. This tuning factors the slightly varying pitch of the overtones generated by piano strings into the equation. This tuning makes allowances for the harmonic “spread” so that the instrument is in relative tune; that is, it sounds great on its own. And the Master Tune knob lets you adjust the default pitch of 440 hertz (A in standard pitch) in the range of 415.3 to 466.2 hertz
Performance
The Grand 2 is an instrument of great technical and tonal complexity. Read that to mean it has a healthy appetite for CPU performance and RAM and hard disk real estate. For this reason, The Grand 2 was endowed with numerous functions that help conserve system resources and improve overall performance.
- Disk Streaming - Disk streaming technology lets you play samples directly from the hard disk to lighten the load of your computer’s main memory.
- Eco Mode - In Eco mode, a single click is all it takes to instantly reduce the RAM and processor load by activating a user-defined preset for the number of voices, disk streaming, sound quality, incidental noise, and so forth.
- RAMSave™ - When RAMSaveTM is enabled, all loaded samples that are not used in the given song are automatically dumped from the main memory. This frees up RAM resources for other processes.
- Quality Knob - The Quality knob lets you trade a slight reduction in sound quality for a boost in system performance.
Minimum System Requirements
The minimum system requirements state the minimal specification your computer must have to be able to use the software. A more powerful system may be required for certain tasks or larger projects. You can find more information about computer system specification and setup
Mac
- Mac OSX 10.4
- Power Mac G5 2 GHz minimum / Intel core Solo 1.5 GHz
- 1 GB RAM (2GB recommended)
- 4 GB free HD space for installation
- DVD drive required for Installation
- CoreAudio compatible audio hardware
- Steinberg Key and USB port required*
- Internet Connection required for license activation
- For using as plug-in or Rewire slave-device, a VST2, AU (tested in Logic 7.2 and Digital Performer 4.6 only) or Rewire compatible host is required.
PC
- Windows XP Home or XP Professional
- Intel / AMD Prozessor 1.6 GHz Minimum
- 1 GB RAM (2GB recommended)
- 4 GB free HD space for installation
- DVD drive required for Installation
- Windows MME compatible audio hardware is required (ASIO compatible audio hardware required for low latency operation).
- Steinberg Key and USB port required*
- Internet Connection required for license activation
- For using as plug-in or Rewire slave-device, a VST2, AU (tested in Logic 7.2 and Digital Performer 4.6 only) or Rewire compatible host is required.
*The Steinberg Key (USB copy protection device) required to run this product is not included. Customers who do not own a Steinberg Key must purchase one separately. The same Steinberg Key copy protection device is then used for all Steinberg products that require it.
