Alesis Classical Piano Q-card

Oooh - plug it in. Certainly easier than screwing around with a Roland expansion board or anything on a Kurzweil.

What appears to be a single 8 MB piano sample, processed in a variety of different nuances. My guess is it's a concert grand Stienway, although the piano itself is not named.

This gets a 10 rating, but could have easily gotten a 1 depending on what you're looking for. See "expressiveness/sounds" below.

This is a lovely piano sample. Lovely as in "neutral and very realistic." Alesis programmers have processed the sound in 64 different ways. Many of these variations seem to be no more than twiddling some f/x settings or some minor filtering. Less than ten of the 64 sounds are "synthetic" treatments. The card repeats these 64 settings in "stretch" tuning. Stretch tuning is commonly used in stage work when the tuner starts tuning the bass notes flatter and the treble notes sharper near the ends of the keyboard. The difference is subtle -- it would not stand out in a mix at all. If you are playing delicate solo work, though, the difference is noticeable.

This sample is considerably more versatile than the jazz piano Q-card in my opinion, which too easily goes to an ff bright sound. (My guess is that the jazz piano sample is a Yamaha, and the classical is a Stienway).

The sample is particularly nice in the mids through the highs. Very clean, very big sounding. The lower mids are a little murky. This is a problem particularly if you are clustering some thick little chord voicings in there, as is typical of jazz work. For classical lines, the lower mids seem to be okay. It does seem though, that the lower mid area goes to full velocity too quickly (i.e., even with a fairly mild touch as I have). I am having to train myself to drop my left hand pretty lightly to avoid murk-build up. The right hand (basically, middle C and above) sounds nice at nearly any velocity and for any type of music.

This sample card will disappoint players looking for a bright percussive sound associated with a lot of pop and rock work (eg Yamaha and Kawai type sound). No matter how hard you hit the board, the upper mids will not smack back with bright cutting hyped harmonics. I love this sample for that reason, since I am a fan of full, round, woody sound rather than sparkly, thin, cutting sound.

It works exceedingly well for classical and jazz work. Although only 8MB, it seriously outclasses some piano samples I've heard that sit in EMU and Akai boxes taking up 32+ MB of RAM. I have a QS-8 and the combination of weighted 88 keys and a real piano sound had me turning off all my synth stuff and actually playing piano music last night for hours.

I can't say that reliability issues would even cross my mind on a sound card.

Let's say I've forgiven Alesis for the 1622 mixer I owned years ago. They are slow in answering e-mail. Not bad on the phone. They are not as frustrating as Roland or Yamaha, but not really great.

I'm not sure if I'd buy a QS-8 again, but if this single card were stolen I'd certainly repurchase it.