MrRay VST Electric Piano – produced by people for SoundFonts.it – is an emulation tool to recreate electric piano’s sounds from classic electric pianos from the seventies.
MrRay VST Electric Piano is based on what is called “Physical Modeling”. The textual definition of this is as follows: «Physical modeling refers to the design and implementation of systems which are based on or derived from physical phenomena.» You can find a visual explanation of this in the SoundFonts.it web site but to translate it to you in simple words it means that every control and sound effect emulated by MrRay is related to a physical element and its related sound particularity from the original instrument being emulated.
The elements that conform an electric piano, for instance, the Fender Rhodes are the following:
• The mallets.
• The tines.
• The tonebars.
• The Pick-ups (one per note), and
• The Amplifier.
You will find a separate control section in MrRay VST for each element listed above.
For those who understand some more about technical specifications, is good to remark that MrRay doesn’t use any sample data to produce sounds.
For users of prior versions, here’s a list of changes in current version 2.2:
• Added: reverb effect
• Added: ping-pong delay option
• Added: Tremolo LFO waveform switchable between triangle and square
• Added: key follow option for the hammer noise
• Added: adjustable velocity response curve
• Added: display tempo divisions when host sync is active
• Added: new presets (room for 32)
• Improved: new phaser and wider chorus
• Fixed: crashes in some hosts caused by the nag screen stopping the host's audio engine
• Fixed: Wah-wah volume was too low
• Fixed: faulty notes when velocity was very low
• Various optimizations, including:
o A new sleep mode which uses almost 0% CPU when idle
o Tines' level and decay are now scaled by velocity and pitch respectively
o New smoother 97 frames knobs
• New nag screen! (shows up for 30 seconds)
Since MrRay is a plug-in you will need a host application to use it. If you want to choose one it’ll be helpful to know that MrRay VST has been tested and known to work just fine in Steinberg Cubase SX2, Nuendo 2 and V-Stack, EnergyXT, Tracktion, miniHost, SAVIHost and VSTHost, Magix Music Maker/Studio, Making Waves and many other hosts.
This amazing tool is available for free but only for Windows users since doesn’t run on Linux based OS or Mac OS X.
Pros
- Donationware", help available after installation on local disk, good phisical representation
Cons
- Only available for Windows users. You need a host application, Only available in english