Review: 4Front Truepianos

Recently my old pop duo Bachelor Girl was booked to do a week of unplugged gigs. 

The line-up would be the lead singer, Tania, and myself on keys and vocals, along with a guitarist who would play for half the set. I would be playing a regular piano sound pretty much the whole night, and I realised my 12-year-old Roland XV-5080 module was not going to cut the mustard. While the piano sound from it is OK with the camouflage of a full band, I’m afraid it’s showing its age, and in the exposed and intimate context of these gigs it would sound clunky and stiff.

I needed a new piano sound, and it had to be really great.

So what to do? Those Nord Stage pianos sound pretty good, and there are good offerings from Yamaha, Roland, Kurzweil and Korg. But I already had a controller keyboard, in a hard case too, which weighed just under the 32kg limit for checking on an airplane. Besides, I didn’t really want to spend between three and five grand just for a week of gigs, when afterwards it would be just another keyboard cluttering up the studio.

GOING FOR THE MODEL

I decided to look at plug-ins, to see if I could tour just a laptop.

Most piano plug-ins stream samples off a disk. They can be pretty demanding on data throughput. Plonk around on a bunch of notes with the sustain pedal held down and suddenly you are streaming copious numbers of 24-bit data streams. Likely the internal 5400RPM laptop drive wouldn’t cope, making me think that perhaps I’d have to tour a dual-disk Raid drive containing the piano samples. 

Then I came across a totally surprising product: A piano plug-in that modelled a piano, rather than using samples of one. It didn’t stream any data from disk, and it claimed to be very light on CPU. I decided to check it out, and downloaded the demo of TruePianos from the manufacturer’s website. 

I remember saying “wow” a lot during those first few minutes of playing it. It seemed impossible that a computer model of a piano could make what I was hearing.

It was rich, detailed, expressive, wide and glorious. Better yet, on my Mac Pro the CPU meter was barely flickering. I had to absolutely punish it by banging on the keyboard with my entire forearm over and over with the sustain pedal down to get the CPU up to maximum. But I couldn’t make it dropout or glitch – it seemed that the plug-in self-regulated, limiting polyphony so nothing ugly occurred. 

There are multiple piano models in the plug-in, representing different real-life pianos. The company making this plug, 4Front, isn’t specific about which is which, since it has mixed and matched the aspects of various real pianos to create its models. Some sounds are more classical, some brighter and more aggressive for rock and contemporary tracks. 

The software is currently at version 1.9, with a version 2 in the works. Most of the piano models are from version 1, which are exceptionally light on CPU, however there is one preview model from the forthcoming version 2. It sounds a little more ‘forward’ than the older models – a definite improvement but it requires more CPU. 

I decided this was the plug-in to use on the road. Time to get it onto the laptop to see how it fared with a computer of much lower spec.