paulnajar

I can speak for it. I was an Ivory 1 & 2 owner and when this one was released it was a no brainer for me. Ivory has always been my most preferred piano. I’ve never got on with their Bossenorfer but the Yamaha and mostly the Steinway have been fabulous pianos. I also own the American Grand and the Fazoli and both of these have been appropriate at times but less often. In Version 3 the German Grand is a clear step forward in playability and sound although it’s getting harder to separate these two areas since one speaks to the other. The nuance and detail in fine control is truly wonderful. My main controller being a Roland A88. Also noteworthy are the multiple mic positions now available in V3 - particularly if you’re mixing music in Atmos. I recently set up 2Ivory instruments in a Atmos mix - one with the side A Mic’s and the other with the MS mics and panned them to somewhat different places in the sound field and it felt like I had my head in the piano sort of. Really beautiful. Dare I say immersive. I know V3 supports MIDI 2.0 but I’m yet to have a controller that can do it. I hear it’s yet a further step up in playing detail. Might be an argument to upgrade my A88 to the Mk2 one of these days. Even playing the version 2 pianos inside the version 3 software interface seems to add a little to the playing experience but not close to the actual only new V3 piano - i3 German Grand. Also be warned this new piano inside the V3 software imposes a noticeably bigger CPU resource overhead. So much so that my old Mac Mini Mainstage rig can’t run it live with low latency. My Mac Studio Ultra M1 - my studio machine - has no issue with it even in a crowded session. I’ll give the final word of my impromptu review to a great musical colleague - a wonderful jazz pianist that I’ve just recently put the final touches on our 6th album together. Fusion style music. He’s done a further 10 albums before we met. All using good quality Yamaha grands at various studios and has a Kawai grand in his own studio. I turned him onto Ivory 2 back on the first record we did and it’s all we’ve used for every record since. It was a tough sell back then but he was immediately convinced once he heard the mixes. He feels that V3 Ivory is a huge advance. I have to agree.

About 3 years ago I had a Studiologic SL88 Studio which I believe has the same Fatar keybed as yours and I had exactly the same problem as you. In the end I took it back under warranty here in Australia. The distributor had it for over a month and was not able to fix it and had no stock to replace it so offered my money back which I gladly took. I was very happy with everything about this board except for this one issue. I even let Studiologic know about this issue and I suspect they know about it all too well but aren’t saying much. It got replaced by a second had Roland A88 which has been a rock solid performer with a very pleasant action. Only thing I dislike about it is the length of it. During the troubleshooting stage when I still had the SL88 Googling around found that this was a not infrequent issue with the TP100LR keybed. Sounds like yours is out of warranty so second hand sale might be best. For me the double midi note issue was completely unacceptable and not something I could live with.

The standard for me has always been the Novation SL Mk2 which I let go of some years ago for a Nektar Panorama P6 because of it’s deep MainStage integration. It’s action is close to excellent but slightly less preferable to me than the Novation as it’s keyfall is a little deeper. I can’t remember if the SL was TP8xx or TP9xx but I agree with AnotherScotts earlier comment that the same keybed does not equal the same feel necessarily because I recall my Prophet 12 keyboard was meant to have the same as the Novation and they did feel different somewhat.

For many years I used my RSS newsreader to keep up with Keyboard corner but mysteriously some months ago the link stopped working. Looking around the site I can't see any reference to it anymore thus the question. Is there still a way to use an RSS newsreader with the Keyboard corner forum? Kind regards

2012 Mac Mini Server here with 2 x 1TB internal SSD's. This machine has always been able to boot headless. For a screen I use an old iPad Air 1 which is my chart reader at the gig as well. I have Duet Display but chose to use Screens a VNC iPad App because you can actually zoom the screen. Duet may have this now. It's been some years since I used it. Back in the day Duet would not allow for this. If I know there will be lots of changes at rehearsals I just bring along a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and still use the iPad for screen otherwise for on the fly small changes and saving, the touch screen iPad is enough and you can double click the home button or 4 finger swipe to swap between my charts and the screen sharing. At the gig the only time I need to look at the Mac mini screen is when the gig is over to tell the Mac to shutdown. I've got everything else setup to boot automatically into my MS concert. One long lightening cable is all the iPad needs for power and screen sharing. In earlier years with this system you had to tether the Mac mini to the iPad 3G to get the network to operate for screen sharing but for some years now this is not necessary either. One of these days I will get a M1 Mac Mini but I will loose the ability to get that second internal drive which for me would then add up to one USB connection too many. I'm not afraid of running samples and OS from one bigger SSD but the advantage of 2 SSD's is that if one should fail the second drive is cloned for a quick change over and better overall redundancy.

Those speculating about class compliant audio drivers and hardware that can take advantage are perhaps overlooking (at least) one thing. The round trip latencies of CC devices is far worse than a well written proprietary driver. As an example I recently did a test with an RME interface that can use it's own driver or use a CC mode. RTL at 32 sample buffer @ 44.1Khz using RME driver was 3.1ms. The same device using CC mode the RTL was 5.4ms - almost double. Don't take my word for it. Do your own tests. For any serious recording work where low RTL is essential, class compliant drivers do not cut it. Even for just playing MainStage or similar from keyboards or VI's in your studio, the CC device puts output latency at over 2ms. Even my lowly Focusrite Scarlett Gen2 offers 1.4ms for output latency via it's own driver.

While I'm fairly critical of IOS as a live sound source solution it does actually make the best chart reader with a program like ForScore. Because my iPad is an older one - the first iPad air I believe, it's battery won't last a gig so it connects to my mac via straight lightening cable to keep it powering and to receive midi messages. There's a nifty little app called Music IO which when active on mac and iPad offers bi directional audio and midi. I only use Music IO to send ForScore a program change to select charts along with each MainStage patch but I mention all this to say that if you use IOS along with Mac OS there is little need for any additional hardware to integrate IOS into a bigger rig when one lightening cable can carry all of that.

So in a roundabout way this topic has been on my mind for some time. While I"ve been an iPad pro gen 2 user for a few years as a non music making general computer, and after this being my third 'non music making' iPad, I"m at the end of the road with IOS for anything other than my phone as an experiment to not use a mac laptop for those tasks. The reasons why are in the details. On the surface IOS appears to be a capable replacement for general computing duties but for me it"s not. You look at it and you go 'oh yes it has many of the same apps I use on OSX' but then as you use things like the mail app, microsoft suite, iWork suite general printing support etc you realise that many of the basic functions you often use in those apps on OSX are just plain missing from the IOS versions - or if not missing they require 2 - 4 different apps to do the same as what one app on os x can offer. I expect I would have a similar level of disappointment - or worse - if I could be bothered to try to use IOS for music making. I"m a very longtime Logic Pro user for my studio business and MainStage user for live keyboard gigs. I feel certain that if - as many have speculated - Apple may release something like MainStage or Logic for IOS those would be just as disappointing as the feelings I expressed further up in this post. My next non music making computer will most likely be the M1 MacBook air or similar. At least then I know what I"m buying rather than the lucky dip of app functionality across 2 different operating systems AND it will make an excellent back stop for my main MainStage performing computer. So, to sum up, in my view it doesn"t matter how powerful the IOS hardware becomes as the limitations will be in the broad feature support of the software and it will always be playing catchup in this area purely because it"s development is decades less evolved. Kind regards

While not completely on point you could get a lot of ribbon like behaviour out of one of these < https://www.keithmcmillen.com/products/quneo/> The biggest ribbon on there would be comparable or bigger in length than the oft referred to Kong Triton and the software programming possibilities are wonderful... Kind regards

Very aussie in the vein of Muriels Wedding & Strictly Ballroom. Nice to see the Hammond Elegante make an appearance as well. My Dad had one for 30 years before it passed to me. Ended up with a music teacher in Canberra

Great thread Guys. After reading through this I have a question about NINJAM for those who have used it. On their webpage they state that each band member is playing along one 'measure' behind the rest of the band. Is that right or has the tech progressed so you can all play on the same bar at the same time now?

You may be able to achieve your goal and more with one of the boxes made by audiofront.net

I happen to like the EP-3 bout the first one I had went bad within 18 months - started to spit out erratic values. Luckily got it replaced out of warranty and the replacement has been going well for 2-3 years now. It"s better than the Boss EV-5 I also use as it doesn"t have the same amount of dead travel at the top and bottom. You can get to to use all is physical range. One negative is the adjustable knob on the side of the pedal can get bumped easily. Good job for a piece of gaffa..

Elmer J, this is exactly what I have been doing for quite a few years. The Mac MINI is the last 2012 machine Quad Core i7 with 2 SSD"s inside. I don"t think you can fit more SSD"s inside the current crop but the new SSD"s are so small now that an external one hanging off one of the USB C ports is not inconvenient. I use an old iPad for my screen (the few times I need it) with 2 different apps - a VNC app called Screens and another called Duet Display. Driving the mac with a touch screen is not always ideal so sometimes I carry a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to make that easier during rehearsals when I"m still modifying things. My 20212 i7 quad core is still very fast for running MainStage and BIG concert setups with things Like Ivory, Keyscape, Arturia V collection etc. The current crop of mac MINI"s would be stupid fast but watch the cost ballon on the current models once you start to pay Apple for their ram and bigger internal SSD. If you team this power with a feedback capable top keyboard like a Nektar Panorama and the weighted action of your choice underneath it"s a dream machine.

I reckon you're on the right track here, but live and studio are not completely different. Live is a subset of recording when talking about triggering virtual instruments from a MIDI controller. To quote from my own earlier post I allude to what you're thinking. That triggering virtual instruments is not round trip, it is only the output side of that full RTL. it's not always half of it either. Sometimes it's a bit more that half the RTL sometimes a bit less. Your issues may simply be that you are asking too much of your system at the latency you wish to perform at. How much RAM? What CPU? What hard drive'/s have you got. What Audio buffer are you working at? OTOH the audio interface makers you mention are not known for their low latency, low CPU overhead performance. So there may be some wiggle room it it for you but more info please.