Chocolate Audio Offers the 88 Series Piano Bundle

The Model 7 grand piano was sampled from a Yamaha C7 grand coda piano. Chocolate Audio’s first idea was to sample a CFIII, but when they went to the rental-house, they totally fell in love with this one, and chose it. This particular piano has been in constant use since the ’80s in two highly praised concert halls in Torino (Italy) and has been played by artists like Michel Petrucciani and Chick Corea throughout the years.

The Model D grand piano was sampled from a Hamburg-made 1939 Steinway D274 grand coda piano. This particular piano has been in use in various venues in Italy and has been played and praised by many top-level international classical and jazz players. This piano’s age definitely guarantees it the vintage moniker, nonetheless it went through proper maintenance and restoration by highly-skilled Italian technicians.

Achieving a quality level on par with Chocolate Audio’s goals from this piano was tough. The onboard electronics are very noisy and the piano picks up a lot of ambient noise, even though it’s electric (Imagine a guitar with 88 strings and a pick-up for each single string!). Through attention and care, both in restoring, preparing, tuning and sampling this amazing piece of technical excellence, Chocolate Audio managed to capture what they believe is the best rendition of this classic compact electric grand piano.

When Chocolate Audio chose to create piano instruments, they carefully selected which upright piano to start from. When facing grand codas, the choice is rather limited, but upright pianos are a totally different world. They wanted a piano capable of producing both a full sound and the shallow, on the edge of being out-of-tune, tone characteristic of so many historic recordings.