Grand Rhapsody Piano: Fazioli-Sampled Piano Plugin by Waves

The piano is captured with eight pairs of microphones, which gives the sampled instrument a wide stereo picture and a lot of detail across the keyboard. Waves describes the Fazioli sound as majestic and dramatic, and the plugin is designed to reproduce that character in a studio or on stage.

When sustain is engaged, sympathetic string resonance is added, so the notes you hold bloom with the ringing of unplayed strings. This is most noticeable in slow, sustained passages and pedal-heavy playing.

The built-in concert-hall reverb offers 10 acoustic environments, so you can place the piano in a room that suits the track without loading an external reverb. This keeps a piano-led project within a single instrument.

The velocity curve can be varied to match your touch, which is useful if you play lightly or with a heavier attack than a standard keyboard response expects. The preset library gives you a set of starting points to shape from.

For performance, the stand-alone mode lets you play the instrument without a host DAW.

Grand Rhapsody Piano suits producers and composers who need a realistic acoustic piano for songs, scores or arrangements, and players who want a Fazioli-recorded tone with built-in room sound. Its NKS support means it can be browsed and controlled from Native Instruments hardware such as Maschine and Komplete Kontrol.