Best iOS acoustic piano

[Jim Alfredson]

I thought I’d make a new thread about this even though it’s related to a post I made in the SK Pro thread. TL;DR… the acoustic piano sounds in the SK Pro leave a lot to be desired. I recently invested in a new iPad Pro. What’s the best piano app for iOS? Looking at IK Multimedia, Ravenscroft… what others are there?

[The Piano Man]

I like Ravenscroft best.

 

I also tried Colossus and Pure Piano.

 

Others have mentioned the Ivory expansion for Korg Module, though I have not tried it.

 

My only issue with all iOS pianos is the very very very slight latency. Not so noticeable playing slow but becomes apparent when playing faster staccato passages etc.

 

Also, I find the Ravenscroft disappointing in mono. It sounds great through headphones in stereo but I often monitor in mono for convenience. Even monitoring in stereo through a pair ZXa1 was not as good as I felt it should be. I always found myself going back to the immediacy of my hardware options such as Kurz PC3x, Roland RD88 and even an old Technics P50.

 

I think you mentioned in another thread you use a pair of DXR10 Jim? Great monitors. Perhaps you will find a way to make the Ravenscroft work. It is certainly a very rich sample and sounds great at home in decent headphones. It really outshines many hardware options in that environment, in my opinion. (Speaking of top quality samples, I actually had the same view on Nords actually. Great in the home in headphones. No use for me when playing live.)

 

Let us know how you get on if you buy Ravenscroft.

 

How do the SK Pro pianos compare to the SK1? I owned the SK1-73.

[Jim Alfredson]

31 minutes ago, The Piano Man said:

I like Ravenscroft best.

 

How do the SK Pro pianos compare to the SK1? I owned the SK1-73.

 

Thank you for the response. The pianos in the SK Pro are better than the original SK but not by much.

[drawback]

Ravenscroft is still the best all-around piano, although I find it can be unstable bit rates when switching on the fly with other apps (standalone or in AUM). I've also used Colossus but don't like the overall tones or interface. Haven't tried Pure Piano, but there was a good discussion on this forum after it launched. Reezekeys may have some points to offer on this (IIRC he ended up sampling his own). 

 

The best overall and most stable piano could very well be the after-purchase addition of Ivory American D in Korg Module Pro. You'll get a pretty darned good Scarbee Rhodes there, too, with easy switching between the sounds without the bit rate headaches with apps a la carte. 

[ElmerJFudd]

I’d be very curious to hear about what you pick, Jim.  And how you feel it compares to the SK Pro’s piano options after you’ve compared! 😊

[AnotherScott]

A couple of people have mentioned Colossus, preferring Ravenscroft, but what hasn't been stated is which Colossus piano they have evaluated, as there are numerous pianos in that app, all available as separate in-app purchases. The one most often mentioned is the largest one (Concert Grand), but personally, I like the red Japanese Grand.

[D. Gauss]

can't speak to "best" piano, though i do have the ravenscroft and find it didn't cut so well.

 

On a somewhat related note, since you have the IPAD, do yourself a favor and download this: https://www.studiologic-music.com/products/numaplayer/

It's free and the interface is truly wonderful on the Ipad.  Oh and it's free. 

[Baldwin Funster]

A warning about IK MM in general. Once they are done with apps, the apps are abandoned like unwanted puppies. When operating systems are updated, usually against your will, the apps don't work and there's no chance of IK going back to fix. Just my experience, maybe others have had better luck.

[ElmerJFudd]

18 minutes ago, Jr. Deluxe said:

A warning about IK MM in general. Once they are done with apps, the apps are abandoned like unwanted puppies. When operating systems are updated, usually against your will, the apps don't work and there's no chance of IK going back to fix. Just my experience, maybe others have had better luck.

Best option with IK would be something that runs in sample tank I think.  Since it’s their main platform on whatever OS, it generates sales of additional sounds.  So theyre very inclined to keep it running  with Apple’s constant iOS updating.  

[drawback]

1 hour ago, AnotherScott said:

A couple of people have mentioned Colossus, preferring Ravenscroft, but what hasn't been stated is which Colossus piano they have evaluated, as there are numerous pianos in that app, all available as separate in-app purchases. The one most often mentioned is the largest one (Concert Grand), but personally, I like the red Japanese Grand.

The Red is the one I have. Do you know if there's a demo mode for any of the others?

[Redknife]

I find the Colossus most appealing for solo piano, whether Jazz or Classical. I’ve only downloaded the largest piano, so I can’t contribute to the discussion about the other models available for download. I’ve not found a demo mode for other models. I would choose Ravenscroft for jack of all (most) trades piano on the iPad.

[Redknife]

Just to add to the Colossus demo question, here is the company’s website with demos. Not the same as playing it yourself but better than nothing:

https://crudebyte.com/mobile/colossus-piano/

[tonybanksfan]

Hi Jim, I’m experimenting a little bit as well with iOS pianos. Like you, I have Ravenscroft and a variety of the Igrand pianos. I tried the Korg American D and Ivory and although not iOS, I’m using the GSI Gemini Steinway and Yamaha as well as my Kurzweil pc3k stock and Dave Weiser’s gig piano’s.

For me, none of them cover all the bases. Different songs sound better on different piano samples, but it’s time consuming figuring out which songs sound best from one of the piano sources because you end up tweaking them and then comparing them continuously.

 I’m not playing live at the moment so it’s kind of a neat little meandering road of sound that I’m trying to decide which I like best. I find none of them is head and shoulders above the rest especially now that I’ve upgraded my mixer to a Key Largo. That one purchase has been one of my best ever, it’s brought a better quality tone to the Kurzweil pianos that weren’t there before, as well as bringing new life to all the pc3k samples. The Key Largo improves the sonic quality of every sample I use regardless of it’s source.

Curious to hear from others on this subject. I do favour the Ravenscroft but for some reason there is some midi issues when switching to and from or with the IK grand using my Kurzweil as the controller, can’t figure that out yet.

[brenner13]

I have them all.

 

 

Ravenscroft is what I use for clean, straightforward piano tone with nice, smooth, natural decay. I have several custom tweaked presets that brighten the tone in various ways to help cut through when needed. Overall pleasingly dynamic, if just a tad harsh. But lots of parameters available to tame it back down.

 

Colossus gets solo duties. I have all IAP’s; the big brown one (14GB) has loads of character and beautiful decay with undulating overtones. However, sometimes the higher velocity samples seem to strangely loose some girth as it brightens up with heavy handed exuberance. But I still like it for the slight tuning character that is lacking in the other “perfect” iOS piano apps. I also have the three uprights loaded and like to play now and then when a tune calls for some attitude. Again, loads of character and pleasing dynamics. The other grands don’t do it for me and I wound up off loading them to free up some space for other Apps. 

Crudebyte also has an earlier piano app called CMP. I think it quite capable too, but it is older tech, similar to IK’s.

 

IK’s iGrands are a rather dated. They were good in 2014. I always felt them limited at higher velocities, though.

SampleTank pianos are pretty lackluster imho; along the lines of GarageBand but with only marginal more “personality”.

 

Pure Piano just doesn’t get bright enough for me and lacks dynamic glitter found in  Ravenscroft and Colossus.

 

Korg Module pianos always seemed kind of lifeless to me in a solo sitch, but really sound quite good and mix well with the band. I prefer the Ivory Grand IAP over the Ivory American D because it is a little brighter and feels a tad faster.

 

i’ve just started messing around with Soundfonts, but the samples I’ve found for it so far don’t have much for velocity layers and the dynamics just aren’t there for me.

 

Numa Player is lots of fun. Danged awesome, if it is still free. Do the big grand. The smaller ones have weird abrupt decay cut-offs that drive me nuts. 

 

My two cents…

 

[Stokely]

Anyone know how any of these work in  mono?

My Modx is sometimes my only keyboard on certain gigs, and my ipad has already been in heavy use as an organ.   I've been struggling with the pianos on the Modx in mono--in stereo, they are fine, but the samples are stereo (well, there is one mono patch and it sounds horrible, worse than the stereo ones do in mono).  All the stereo ones lose volume and get "honky" in mono.  If one of these IOS pianos fares better, I might consider making it my main piano when I use the Modx.

[Reezekeys]

I can't add much to this conversation beyond the excellent overview brenner13 gave above - just a personal experience. In the end, a satisfying piano to play is very much a subjective thing informed by our own experiences. I've used a laptop with the Native Instruments New York piano for a very long time (16 years) so I'm quite used to a piano with multiple velocity layers, key-off samples, sustain pedal resonance, etc. For me the bar was pretty high when I started looking at iOS pianos. I didn't try every one out there, but knowing what I'm used to I was hesitant to start spending money on piano apps that had a good chance of not working for me. I tried the Korg Ivory (the only one with a demo period, afaik), and did pay for Pure Piano which as I remember was getting a lot of praise. Neither one did it for me. What I wound up doing is using Logic's Auto Sampler to re-sample my NI New York piano and load the resulting .exs instrument into an iOS app called AudioLayer, which is a sampler app. Rather than re-hash what I already posted into an already long tome, here's the thread I started with the gory details in the first post. The bottom line is that with AudioLayer and Auto Sampler, you can take the virtual piano or hardware DP you use and love, and have it on your iOS device:

 

https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/182187-my-smallest-key-rig-yet-ios-for-virtual-piano-nerds-only-long-sorry/

 

(I had a little too much coffee before recording the video - ouch!)

 

I'll add two things - first, I started that thread before I began using my resampled NY Piano on my iPad for any local gigs, so can now report that I'm 100% happy with it. Since I know what the iOS version doesn't have compared to my laptop, I do notice the differences - when I'm listening for them! I would not record with my iOS version – then again, that's not what it's for - it's only for smaller local gigs where I want to avoid the shlep & setup of my laptop but still be happy making music. And, the iPad doubles as a chart reader (I use ForScore).

 

Second - I believe AudioLayer is on sale, something I found out by accident when I looked it up in the iOS app store just now ($10 instead of the usual $20 or $30). No, I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer! It's quite a powerful program, and with its ability to load exs or sfz files, with a little work one can get some high-quality sound out of their i-device. I'm playing a 10-velocity layer acoustic piano on an almost 8-year-old iPad Air 2 with almost imperceptible latency.

[miden]

Ravenscroft and Ivory in module pro. Look no further.

 

I have the IK stuff but as IK are not going to release AUv3 versions of their pianos (including EPs) or Sampletank. I have removed them. Not that they were used over Ravenscroft or Ivory anyway

[AnotherScott]

11 hours ago, brenner13 said:

i’ve just started messing around with Soundfonts, but the samples I’ve found for it so far don’t have much for velocity layers and the dynamics just aren’t there for me.

I keep meaning to play with soundfonts on iOS (e.g. using BS-16i), but haven't gotten around to it. But I loaded soundfonts into my Dexibell, and found some not-too-big soundfont pianos that I like, either for general purpose use (the first two, IIRC), or for particular usages (the other two):

 

Yamaha C5 Grand-v2.4 (232 mb)

Nice-Steinway-Lite-v3.0 (71 mb)

MasonHamlin-A-CloseMic-v5.2 (206 mb)

Chateau Grand Lite-v1.0 (47 MB)

 

They're all downloadable from the "Single Piano Sets" section at https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/

 

I see that that site has recently added a Yamaha S6 and a Fazioli 308, I haven't tried those.

 

 

[miden]

Personally, I find the soundfont ones to be too "one-dimensional" there's not a lot of nuance with them...Probs ok in a mix though.

[AnotherScott]

6 minutes ago, miden said:

Personally, I find the soundfont ones to be too "one-dimensional" there's not a lot of nuance with them...Probs ok in a mix though.

My usages have been for either playing live with a band (usually through EV ZXa1, mono), or playing solo in a "cocktail hour" environment through the Dexibell's own speakers (stereo), which is also probably why even "lite" versions were sufficient. I can't speak to how they would behave in a more demanding application.

 

That said, I'm pretty confident that one or more of them would be better than what's in most keyboards, including the SK Pro the op is asking about playing them from. I have not compared them to the Ravenscroft you like, though.

[jeffincltnc]

I only tried the Ravenscroft and the Soundfonts libraries.  Just to let you know that bs-16i is an inexpensive app and the soundfonts are free.  There are some nice character pianos there.  The Ravenscroft also has some nice variations for jazz rather than just a bright piano.

 

I used to carry an iPad for rehearsals with a Roland FA-07 for portability and the iPad had Ravenscroft, Neo Soul Keys and B3X.   I loved the Neo Soul Keys and B3X as upgrades to the internal Roland sounds, but the acoustic piano apps still seemed to be limited in latency and polyphony.   My iPad is probably 5 years old now, so I think your new iPad Pro will do much better!

[Kelly Gibson]

I have the Ravenscroft but I prefer the Colossus Red piano (Japanese grand) for iOS. It seems more focused and has more hammer thunk than Ravenscroft. Also, latency really bugs me, Colossus seems to have minimal issues with this on my older iPad Air. 

[Kawai James]

9 hours ago, Stokely said:

Anyone know how any of these work in  mono?

Right, this is the question I'm curious about too.

 

On my Nord, I gravitated towards the Black Upright sample, partly because I grew-up playing an upright and have some nostalgia for that sound, and also because the tonal character works well for the late 60s funk and soul music that I enjoy.  I also found that this piano sound held up reasonably well when playing in mono.

 

My new iPad arrived yesterday (haven't unboxed it yet...), so am keen to start transitioning over from the Nord sounds to iOS apps.  I'll have organ and EPs covered with B-3X and NeoSoul Keys, but I'm wondering about acoustic pianos - specifically an upright.

 

The other day I stumbled upon the "Platinum Upright" in-app upgrade for the free Pure Synth app, produced by Gospel Musicians.  Jamal obviously knows his stuff when it comes to iOS virtual instruments thanks to his great work on NeoSoul keys, so I'm hoping this could be a good replacement for the Black Upright on my Nord - it's just a question of how well it holds up in mono.

 

Demo playing starts from 16:37 (I don't particularly care for the beats he's playing along to, but I dig the piano sound itself):

 

 

Cheers,

James

x

[miden]

10 hours ago, Stokely said:

Anyone know how any of these work in  mono?

 

 

No sure about "pure stereo" but I run the L/R outs from the iPad headphone jack (or the mixer if using the digital mixer) into two inputs on the single speaker stack. Either the EV Evolve 30m or Evolve 50, or the JBL Eon One...and they all sound fine to me. So I guess it's sorta kind pseudo "summing" if you like so perhaps not really true stereo, but yeah they sound fine to my ears.

[Mighty Motif Max]

10 hours ago, Stokely said:

...I've been struggling with the pianos on the Modx in mono--in stereo, they are fine, but the samples are stereo (well, there is one mono patch and it sounds horrible, worse than the stereo ones do in mono).  All the stereo ones lose volume and get "honky" in mono.  If one of these IOS pianos fares better, I might consider making it my main piano when I use the Modx.

Did you have any luck with the S6 samples, particularly the S6 Rock with a bit of EQ?

[Stokely]

12 hours ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

Did you have any luck with the S6 samples, particularly the S6 Rock with a bit of EQ?

Argh....I honestly forgot to try them, I put one of the S6 patches in my live sets but then due to a hectic gig I went back to my normal CFX but with the part volumes maxed (as the volume drops in mono).  I'll definitely make a point to test that one out before the next gig, although I'd like to start bringing the Forte7 back out more.   I've had three "might rain on us" gigs in a row and for those I keep it small and light.

I also tried just the right output (vs the left, which has the "mono" summing) and the synth patch I use for one particular song fell WAY down in volume...so I pretty obviously had some panning going on inside that performance with the main bulk of the sound more on the left.  That's a reminder not to try stuff for the first time at gigs!  

One thing I don't like about the Key Largo is that there's no option to go mono if you plug in both channels....if you do that, the L and R main outs only get what is in the L and R of each channel.   So any summing I do has to be from the Modx.   What I need to do is simply go in and make sure the parts are panned center and test them for sound and volume.

Anyway I may keep an eye out for the Ravenscroft on sale if it does it.  Other than mono, my concern would be latency with my older ipad.  I don't mind upgrading if I need to, at this point the ipad is integral to my rig (I think of it as an add-on to the modx.)   Another option is an add-on library--I have Purgatory Creek and love it--but organimation charges a load for their piano.  Still, might be worth it if I do a lot more gigs with just the modx.

[Reezekeys]

2 hours ago, Stokely said:

Other than mono, my concern would be latency with my older ipad.

 

My AUM setup has my 644MB AudioLayer piano, two instances of Korg Module (Scarbee rhodes & factory strings), Galileo organ, and a few AUM channels of Streambyter doing midi processing, five or six AUM channels with file players, and a reverb efx plugin on my master bus. This on an almost 8-year-old iPad Air 2 with the buffer at 256 samples. No pops or clicks and more than acceptable latency, imo. I'm not sure how much more I can add, but for the kinds of smaller local gigs I do I'm pretty well covered at the moment. I also run ForScore and iReal Pro along with AUM on most of the gigs.

[Stokely]

Nice.  Worth a try, I have a 4th-gen ipad.  I currently run B-3x standalone, and have tested running three different apps  the same way simultaneously.  It's primitive, basically each is just set up to respond on a different midi channel and all of course have to be able to run in the background    I haven't tried messing with AUM in other words.  I might want to if the app(s) I'm using didn't have their own fx.

Anyway didn't mean to derail the thread.

[kenheeter]

That Numa player app is awesome!!

[Reezekeys]

---DELETED---

 

(Couldn't edit it the way I wanted with the current forum sw)