Ravenscroft 275 Piano 4+

When I first purchased Ravenscroft 275 I was quite disappointed with the sound. When I played with greater velocity it never seemed to deliver the percussive, brighter hammer action sound I felt it should have. And no matter how I adjusted the two Velocity parameters in the App I was disappointed. Well, my M-Audio Keystation 88 began to have problems with a few keys loosing their velocity. And this keyboard had no internal way to adjust the velocity sensitivity. That was totally dependent on the software. I replaced the Keystation 88 with the Nektar LX88+ which does have internal adjustment of velocity. It allows the full spectrum of the Ravenscroft 275 to come through. I am now more satisfied with the resulting sound. However, it still lacks a realistic hammer attack in the sound. The main thing this has going for it is sympathetic resonance. I seriously feel I get a more satisfying result with several pianos from iGrand and SampleTank. Being some of the early releases of sampled pianos for IOS, they lack sympathetic resonance. But with careful blending of some reverb that can help, somewhat, in that area. The other shortcoming of iGrand is a 64 note polyphony limitation. I have several of the major acoustic pianos for IOS. But, I still tend to favor the pianos in iGrand and SampleTank.

I play literally hundreds of Darius digital pianos with USB midi and audio connectivity. I’ve also played hundreds of professional acoustic grand pianos. For an inexpensive acoustic piano app, this is certainly one of the best I’ve used on a digital piano or midi controller digital piano. Beautiful, resonate sound with long damper pedal decay time and It has enough features to do most of the editing that I want. But as far as I can tell it’s missing half-damper pedal control when connected to a digital piano, and for me that’s a big issue. I like the expressiveness and control of the half-damper pedal which most lower and higher priced digital pianos now have internally. Acoustic pianos have continuous variable damper pedal control, but when using this app it does not send that function to the sustain pedal so it’s just basically on and off with a little bit of re-pedaling which can make the sound a bit choppy when using a sustain pedal. Not very happy with that. Perhaps Ravenscroft can do something about this or let me know if I am missing something here. Otherwise the app is very usable and much better than most, especially for the money.

I own a few other iPad piano apps. This is abosuletly the best sounding piano. Also, I use them all with the app keyboard that displays on the screen. This is the only one that lets me resize the keyboard incrementally enough and accurately enough to mimick a real keyboard octave size so my finger spacing is the same as it would be on a real piano.

Update: I have been using this app with the built in keyboard for a few weeks now and I have discovered a few bugs. This piano is so realistic that a key sticks every now and then. Yip, you read me right. Every so often a key becomes inactive, as if it is stuck, like an old piano key. Also if you play too much too fast, the whole sound freezes every now and then. It is as if the buffer gets full and has to have a few extra seconds to clear. This was an expensive app to purchase, so I hope the developers will work out these bugs. If and when they do, I will update this review.