I don't use the reverb or EQ in the "Studio tab"
First dial I reduce is the "room/release volume" In the "piano tab", you might start by keeping everything on 12 o'clock which I was told is default (!?!). The default piano preset seems to be quite popular here I always find myself returning to it (albeit trying to reduce Abbey Road room acoustics). That helped me wrestle the room ambience a bit better.
To understand the samples and what the dials do, it helped me to try with speakers and a few different headphones. The CFX lite only has the close m49/km184 mics, which have significantly less room acoustics than the "ambient" mics do in Garritan CFX. I know CyberGene has the exact opposite views, and thinks the Garritan CFX is a magnus opus and the Arturia a monstrosity.Ĭould someone PM me and share with me a favorite preset that I can load into CFX Lite? I want to like this piano. There aren't many who have tried the Arturia. There are quite a few people on this forum who rave about the Garritan. I feel like I really connect with some of the presets on the Arturia. And when I play chords with pedal down and light reverb, I can hear each individual note. I don't hear the synthetic resonance that I can detect in Pianoteq. With the Arturia pianos, you can hear the sympathetic resonance. I love the American Grand, The German Grand, and the Pop U3 (with linear velocity). With a few of the presets,I only needed to make minor eq tweaks to sound fantastic to my ears. This disenchantment with the CFX really, really makes me appreciate the Arturia pianos. I just don't get it.Īnd almost all of the other presets are really niche sounds that might sound great in a recording but don't sound like sitting at a grand piano. The chords with pedal down still sound very convoluted to me.
But I put them at 2 o'clock - just a little bit like I think a real piano would have. Why not make the default sound the sound that most people would hear when they play the real piano? I want the resonance levels of the default setting to be what the real CFX produces! Not owning a real CFX, I don't know where to put those levels. Then I'm fishing around and I see that even though the piano is swimming in resonance because of the mic perspective, the sustain resonance and sympathetic resonance are turned off. When I first played the default, I thought, "How do I get rid of all this reverb?" Then I saw that the reverb was off! All the reverb was coming from the mic perspective (Correct me if I'm wrong). Each piano model has its distinct sound, and I would characterize the CFX as a supermodel - no blemishes that I can hear. The tonality of the piano is exquisite, maybe a little too perfect. It's definitely not a fit for me even though the demos sound good, so maybe I'm missing something. A friend is allowing me to review CFX Lite on my computer for a few weeks.