Native Instruments Elektrik Piano VST PC

20 years in computer music. started when midi was brand new and I can't believe MIDI ports are still HERE!!

Very easy, intuitive, there are low/medium/high RAM versions of all sounds. I mostly use low and medium and I'm happy with the quality. HIGH RAM means 500+Meg so watch your memory.

excellent, musical, very playablem, very authentic. The Wurly brings back memories of my childhood A200!

10

CONS: I'm not crazy for the clav and there's no harpsichord. They could've added marimba, xylohpone and they could've added contemporary and 90s and new electric pno sounds - especially since NI has FM7, I'm surprised they just didn't add the FM Elect. Pno sond(so popular in the 80s, Chicago hits of the 80s, etc).

I use Electric Piano (1st version) in Sonar 5 as a DXi plug in, on a Windows XP Pentium system, listening through headphones. My music speciality is melodic pop instrumentals.

Interface is mostly intuitive. The program is a specialized sampler for electric pianos, so presets are slow to load because they are large samples.

Each preset contains 4 predetermined FXs to alter the sound, such as saturation, delay, and autopan. Unfortunately, you are stuck with the 4 FXs in each preset, so you can't swap one FX with another FX. Therefore, tweakability is (unnecessarily) limited.

This product has a very nasty habit of crashing my entire computer system when I try to adjust the FX settings. These crashes have happened several times, and made me leery of using this program! The problem seems to occur when I am running other DXis in SONAR at the same time that Electrik Piano is executing, at the same time that I am trying to tweak an Electrik Piano FX setting.

Manual is extremely small, but adequate.

Sounds are limited to 4 classic electric pianos, plus some nice FX. This product is certainly not as tonally flexible as soft synths such as FM7, Pro53 and Absynth ... but if you want an electrik piano simulation, this is probably the best one on the market.

Sound quality is generally high, but I did notice that some adjacent samples (say C and C#) can sound quite differently; apparently this is because the samples were recorded from a real eccentric piano. Some people might like this, I find it slightly irritating.

Pros: If you want an electric piano simulation, I assume that this product is equal to, or better than, any electric piano simulation on the market. However, I didn't find the tonality of the electric piano to be all that useful in my music. Your mileage may vary. Listen to the samples on the NI website to see if you could imagine using this product in your music.

Cons: tweakability is very limited, which makes is hard to sculpt the sound to fit your mix. Tonality is limited to the electric piano realm. It crashes frequently.

The Elektrik Piano is great. I had a few hours of playtime with the standalone, through headphones, an amp and studio monitors, and Im happy to say it has the best, by FAR, Mark I Rhodes and Wurli 200A samples Ive EVER heard, short of the real deal. I play jazz and funk and currently gig with a Mark 1 73 and an ESQ-1 controlling the B4 plugin (standalone) on a P2 laptop.

The interface is nice, like all NI products its design captures the essence of the original but adds a modern, functional touch.
Three knobs on the right are constant- Tune, Pan and Volume (somewhat of an overdrive effect)
Four knobs on the left are open ended effect knobs that change according to the patch you select.
In between is a 80s style LCD with load/save/etc. buttons.
Didnt read the manual yet, had pretty much everything I needed to know figured out in 20 minutes. God bless Native Instruments.

There are several variants of each sound on the Elektrik Piano. 20 something presets for each instrument (more than enough) with all the FX you can imagine. Native doesnt just throw presets in with the package, its obvious in all of their products that the presets are carefully considered and "hand picked." Each instrument has 3 "essential" patches, i.e raw sound no effects. Essential, Essential (medium) and Essential (small) refer to the amount of memory (in Elektriks case Disk space, not RAM) and quality of the samples. Folks, even the Essential (small) patches are stunning.
The full blow Essential for each instrument is simply amazing.

I will rate each instrument here:
Rhodes MK1 - Fantastic. They NAILED the top half of the keyboard, and midrange is also terrific. The low range- like a real rhodes mk. 1- is muddy and I tend to not use it unless im doubling octaves. A+

Rhodes MK2- Very good. I dont have much time on MK 2's, but with a touch of chorus and 'verb you are instantly taken back to Al Jarreau records. Classic, A-

Wurlizter- They nailed this one, folks. Best patch I've ever heard- low register is grinding and upper register has the roundness down. I'll mention here that the mod-wheel, by default (on all the 'essential' patches), controls tremelo intensity. I have heard quite a few wurlies in my day and im reluctant, but truthfully saying that this one is even BETTER than the original. A+

Clavinet D6- Very good, especially when with the effects. The essential patch is excellent, and really responds to my "plucking" clav technique (or lack thereof). Not the "Superstition" clav sound you want (although its sounds damn good,) but a really funky usuable clav, especially through the effects (Auto-filter and Dynamic Wah are perfect, with a little tweaking. A-

Overall, this is to the electric pianos included as the b4 is to the hammond b3. As close to the original as I've heard on any board. (Blows away the Nord Elektro 2, which is amazing itself). If this ran on an older PC (my gigging laptop is a P2 400mhz) i wouldnt have to bring my rhodes to gigs.
Best Mk. 1 rhodes, Best Wurli to this date. Period.
Great Mk.2, Great clav. Top 3 in each category, for sure.

Has built in reverb, tremolo, all the effects you would use. (Didnt see a flanger, but didnt look that hard either).

9.8/10