Chocolate Audio - The 88 Series - Model 7 Grand KONTAKT

The Model 7 grand piano was sampled from a Yamaha C7 grand coda piano. Our first idea was to sample a CFIII, but when we went to the rental-house we 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 along the years. This piano is under constant maintenance by highly-skilled italian technicians. We sampled this little-big monster of a piano in a medium-size hall surrounded by a smorgasbord of microphones.

Macro-phones
We didn't settle for a single pair or a limited selection of microphones from the start, we wanted to make sure that the piano, after the sampling and editing process had the best chances to preserve its soul, something which can be hard to achieve. For this very reason, we used many more microphones than the ones we ended up with.

Choice of Microphones
These are the Mics we carefully selected after multiple playing and listening sessions on the edited samples:

a Schoeps CMC6 with MK4 cardiod capsules matched-pair placed at the player's position
a Royer 121 matched-pair placed inside the open-lid but at a healthy distance from the soundboard to pickup both the direct sound and the reflections from the lid thanks to their figure-8 patterns
a modded Oktava MK-012 spaced matched-pair, placed right above the strings
a pair of matched Neumann M149 mics to pick up the sound from a medium distance