It's joined by a Wing upright piano from 1900 in two configurations: with tacks on the hammers, and with its bizarre ball bearing 'tremolo' pedal option in place.įor us, the best of Keyscape's extraordinary series of classic 'boards is to be found in the Electric Pianos category. Heading up the Acoustic Pianos category is the LA Custom C7, an 'enhanced' Yamaha C7 that uses'rare long-fiber virgin wool felt' on its hammers.

We could spend three times as many words as we have available for this whole review discussing the actual keyboards at the heart of Keyscape, but here's a quick summary of the highlights - the full line-up can be explored on the Spectrasonics website. The text 'Preview ready' appears in the progress bar when the patch is available for basic (ie, without round-robins and the full stack of velocity layers loaded) auditioning onscreen or via an attached keyboard, though, which shortens the thumb-twiddling time a bit. Loading a preset takes a while with many of the instruments, even from SSD, as you'd expect, given their scale. The presets are listed in the bottom pane, and with over 500 included, most of them come in related sets, so 'Rhodes - Classic Amp' is followed by 'Rhodes - Classic Amp Warm Blues', 'Rhodes - Classic Amp Clean Dry', etc.

The browser lets you select from the ten top-level instrument types in the top pane (Acoustic Pianos, Clavinets, Electric Pianos, etc), or head straight to one of the 36 specific models in the dropdown menu below.

Keyscape's interface is clean and straightforward: patch browser on the left big picture of the loaded keyboard in the middle (sadly not mouse-playable) tabbed sound editing, Settings and Info (revealing the history of the current keyboard) section at the bottom and Utility and System menus at the top. All that's required to do this is the latest version of Omnisphere 2, which makes Keyscape's presets available in its browser and loads them in as layers, complete with all their controls. However, Omnisphere 2 owners can actually load Keyscape presets into said synth, bringing its arsenal of sound-shaping and processing weaponry to bear on Keyscape's vintage tones. While Omnisphere gives you an expansive range of editable parameters and synthesis engines to delve into, Keyscape is all about the sampled instruments themselves, rather than the comprehensive tweaking of them.

Spectrasonics keyscape