GALAXY II GRAND PIANO COLLECTION 1. FEATURES.....................................................................................................................................................................3 2. THE PIANOS .................................................................................................................................................................3 A. VIENNA GRAND IMPERIAL ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................3 B. 1929 GERMAN BABY GRAND ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................4 C. GALAXY STEINWAY....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................4 3. INSTALLATION: .............................................................................................................................................................4 A. INSTALLATION UNDER MAC OS X: ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................4 B. INSTALLATION UNDER WINDOWS XP..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................5 C. AUTHORIZING THE LIBRARY .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................7 D. FORMAT ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................7 4. LOADING INSTRUMENTS: ...............................................................................................................................................9 5. GALAXY II’S INSTRUMENT-INTERFACE:..........................................................................................................................11 6. GLOBAL PRESETS ........................................................................................................................................................12 7. MAIN MENU ..............................................................................................................................................................12 A. THE MAIN MENU’S TONE SECTION: ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................12 B. THE MAIN MENU’S ANATOMY SECTION: ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................13 C. THE MAIN MENU’S NOISES SECTION:.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................13 D. THE MAIN MENU’S SPACE SECTION: .........................................................................................................................................................................................................................13 E. THE MAIN MENUS WARP SECTION:..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................13 8. TONE MENU ...............................................................................................................................................................14 A. COLOUR: ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................14 B. RESONANCE: ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................14 C. WARMTH & PUNCH: ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................14 D. LOUDNESS.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................15 E. LOW KEYS: ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................15 F. LID:..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................15 G. PEDALS/SOFT PEDAL: .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................15 H. COMPRESSOR:............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16 9. ANATOMY MENU........................................................................................................................................................16 A. WIDTH & LISTENING POSITION:.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16 B. PITCH & TUNINGS:......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................17 C. TRANSPOSE & FINETUNE: .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................17 D. SYMPATHETIC STRING RESONANCE: ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................17 E. REPEDALLING .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18 F. SILENT KEY ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18 G. DYNAMIC ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18 H. VELOCITY EDITOR:.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18 10. NOISES MENU ........................................................................................................................................................19 A. RELEASE SAMPLES.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20 B. HAMMER NOISES ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20 C. DAMPER NOISE...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20 D. PEDAL NOISES ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20 E. STRING NOISE ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................20 11. SPACE MENU .........................................................................................................................................................20 12. THE WARP SECTION ................................................................................................................................................21 A. THE PAD-MACHINE ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................22 B. THE DEGRADER...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................22 C. THE SPIRITUALIZER ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................23 D. THE ALTERIZER ...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................23 E. THE TIME TRAVELLER....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................23

1. FEATURES Welcome to GALAXY II - a collection of three great sounding grand pianos with three distinct characters. Includes-

• The 5 star awarded GALAXY STEINWAY - a STEINWAY D, sampled in stereo and 5.1 surround with an incredible dynamic range. • The VIENNA GRAND IMPERIAL -a huge and powerful BÖSENDORFER 290 with great bottom end and punch, • and the 1929 GERMAN BABY GRAND - an 75 year old VINTAGE BLÜTHNER with a beautiful intimate tone.

• This library contains more than 6000 samples in 24 Bit, • mapped in up to 13 modeled velocity zones for a wide and smooth dynamic range, • with real sustain resonance and release with multiple velocity, • using real Una Corda Samples (Soft Pedal). • Adjustable Hammer –, Pedal-, Damper- and Stringnoises. • Introducing Sympathetic String Resonance with real overtones, • including Sostenuto and Redamper pedal functions.

• Based on Native Instrumentents KONTAKT 2 PLAYER, • including a specially designed user interface • with an integrated help window. • Direct control of all important functions in the main menu and detailed editing in 10 special menus. • One-button control of tone colour, warmth, low end, loudness, punch and dynamics. • Adjustable Stereo width and position, • and a flexible and easy to use velocity editor. • Introducing a specially designed compressor for typical pop-piano Sounds, • a warp-section with 4 FX-machines for drastic sounddesign • and a Convolution-reverb with lots of rooms, halls and ambiences.

2. The Pianos

A. VIENNA GRAND IMPERIAL Galaxy II’s Vienna Grand is comprised of sampling a BOESENDORFER IMPERIAL 290 grand piano. Established by Ignaz Bösendorfer in 1828, Bösendorfer are the oldest piano manufacturers still in production and have a history of constructing some of the worlds finest instruments. The Model 290 Imperial, a 9’6” grand piano, is famous for its powerful soundboard and its extended keyboard; going as far as a bottom C0, making a full eight octave range or 97 keys. Sometimes, these extra keys are hidden under a small hinged lid, on others, the colours of the extra white keys are reversed (black instead of white). The extra keys are added primarily for increased resonance from the associated strings; that is, they vibrate sympathetically with other strings whenever the damper pedal is depressed thus creating a fuller tone. With the VIENNA GRAND they are playable. The Vienna Grand was recorded at Hansahaus Studios/Germany which is famous for its outstanding Jazz Recordings and has received two Grammy Awards. We placed great emphasis on capturing the Bösendorfers huge dynamic range and energy, especially its powerful low end; using additional microphones in the lower register.

B. 1929 GERMAN BABY GRAND The Blüthner piano company has been manufacturing the Europes finest pianos in their factory in Leipzig, Germany since 1853. By 1885, the company was the largest European piano manufacturer. Numerous royals, composers, conductors, artists and performers have owned Blüthner pianos. They include Brahms, Bartok, Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Blüthners have also been used in popular music. One was used on The Beatles’ Let It Be album, most notably, in the hits ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Galaxy II’s 1929 GERMAN BABY GRAND is based on a BLÜTHNER Model 150, built in 1929. This beautiful 75 year old grand piano features a warm , vintage sound with a wonderful initimate tone.

C. GALAXY STEINWAY Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, piano maker of the Steinweg brand, emigrated from Germany to America in 1850. In 1853, Steinweg founded Steinway & Sons, by the year 2000, Steinway had made its 550,000th piano. The Steinway Model D 270 is probably the most popular concert grand of all. For Galaxy II, a Model D was recorded in Galaxy Studios, Belgium; one of the most sophisticated high-end studios in Europe, which also boasts a huge recording hall. The instrument was chosen by studio owner Wilfried van Baaren from a range of dozens of instruments at Steinway/Hamburg. It has been recorded in 5.1 surround and stereo with a tremendous microphone setup to capture its size and dynamic range with 6 channels.

3. Installation: (Although this manual includes basic instructions on how to install the Galaxy II and loading its instruments, it primarily deals with the instruments and how to use them. If you want to read more about installation, plug-in formats and hosts, etc; please refer to the ‘Kontakt Player 2 Manual’ on the installer disc or as a download on www.galaxypianos.com .)

A. Installation under Mac OS X: If Galaxy II is your first KONTAKT PLAYER 2 (KP2) product, then the Player will be installed with the library. If you already own a KP 2 library, the Player installation will be skipped and just the library will be installed.

• Insert the Galaxy II Install DVD into the DVD drive of your computer. • Double-click the installation program INSTALL GALAXY II to start it. • The start screen appears first. After clicking Continue and confirming the License Agreement, a window opens where you

can select the Installation Destination of the K2 Player, which will usually be the application folder on your system disk.

• Next is the Installation Type: You can choose ‘Easy Install’ if you want to install all formats (Standalone, AU, VST, RTAS) or ‘Custom Install’ if you want to (re)install just one or more items without installing everything again. Or if you know that you do not need certain items to be installed (like an RTAS installation, if you don’t use Protools). In this case, leave the necessary items unchecked.

• After choosing ‘install’ you will be asked to enter your name and serial number. • After clicking ‘Continue’ you have to choose a destination folder for the Library, which, including all pianos, has a size of 29 GB.

During the installation process the installer will ask you to insert the remaining DVDs, because all Library files will be installed during the installation process. You won’t have to copy any files manually. If you want to delete one of the pianos afterwards, please locate the Galaxy II Library Folder and delete the corresponding .nkx files. Just be sure to keep all other .nkx files including “Basic Samples’, ‘Pad Samples’ and Galaxy II Impulses’!

• Finally you will be asked to start the NI Service Center for Authorizing your Galaxy II Library

B. Installation under Windows XP

• Insert the GALAXY II Install DVD into the optical drive. • Use the Windows Explorer to view the contents of the disk.

• Start the installation by double-clicking GALAXY II Setup.exe. • The start screen appears first. Click Accept to confirm the License Agreement.

• During the installation process the installer will ask you to insert the remaining DVDs, because all Library files will be installed during the installation process. You won’t have to copy any files manually. If you want to delete one of the pianos afterwards, please locate the Galaxy II Library Folder and delete the corresponding .nkx files.

• In the next window you will be asked to enter your name and serial number.

• The setup program will suggest C:\Program Files\Native Instruments\KONTAKT PLAYER 2 as a path for the destination folder, as well as for the different components like VST or RTAS, but you may also choose another folder.

• Afterwards the install program will also suggest a Library destination path and a destination location fort he VST Plugin. Please remember that the library contains about 29 GB of samples and that the Library folder does not have to be on the same hard disk as the Player.

• Now you can entert the name of the Program Manager groupto add Galaxy II icons to • Finally the setup gives you a ‘Installation complete note’ where you can choose to load the ‘Galaxy II UserManual’, to ‘start the

Kontakt Player 2 now’ and to ‘start the NI Service Center”.

C. Authorizing the Library After installing the library, it will run in demo mode (also called the grace period) for 30 days. When you launch KONTAKT PLAYER 2, the Browser will show a little caution icon to the left of the library title. Yellow means the library is running in demo mode. After a library has been properly registered, the caution icon disappears entirely. Red means the demo period has expired and the library can no longer be used until it has been registered. To authorize the library, you should use the Native Instruments Service Centre application, which was installed along with the KONTAKT PLAYER 2 software. Service Centre starts after initial use of Galaxy II, you can also activate it through the Info box registration tab. For more information on how to use Service Centre please see the accompanying documents in the Service Centre application folder.

D. Format GALAXY II may be used as a standalone application and as a plug-in within a host sequencer. Standalone operation is ideal for situations in which GII is the only audio software you need to run on the computer, for example-live or if you just want to play. To use GII as a standalone application, go to the Program Files or Applications folder and launch Kontakt Player 2. When you do this, KP2 communicates directly with your computer's audio and MIDI hardware interfaces, therefore you have to go to the SETUP Menu and choose your audio and midi hardware. Used as a plug-in, KONTAKT PLAYER 2 works as a ‘module’ that can be used within a host sequencer. KP2 is available for use in VST, DXi and RTAS formats on the PC and in VST, AudioUnit (AU) and RTAS formats on the Macintosh. It depends on your sequencer, how you load the K2 Player. (take a look at the ‘Kontakt Player 2 Manual’ in the document folder) When GII is used as a plug-in in any of these formats, it's not necessary to set up Audio/MIDI settings. KP2 operates within the host sequencer, automatically receiving the MIDI that the host sequencer sends to it and sending back its audio output to the host sequencer. Because of this, settings regarding audio and MIDI interfaces as well as buffer sizes (latency), are governed by the host sequencer, not by KP2.

After loading the K2 Player, you will find several buttons at the top of the Player window for basic navigation:

Pushing the Browser button opens GII’s browser on the left, where you will find all instruments and Info on GII. Below, you will find out more on loading the instruments.

Pushing Outputs opens the output window where you can assign the outputs of your system to GII using the Config. Button.

Keyboard opens a virtual keyboard at the bottom of the interface to ‘play’ without using an external keyboard.

In the Master Control section, you can turn on a Metronome, control it’s tempo and switch on a reference tone. Mastertune is also controllable in GII.

Load/Save obviously deals with loading and saving instruments. In GII there are a couple of convenient ways of loading an instrument. The only way to save adjustments however, is to save an instrument via this little menu since Presets within Kontakt 2 are not saveable. If you save an instrument into the ‘User Patches’ Folder of K2, it will appear in the Library Boxes’ ‘User Instruments’. If you save it to the instrument folder of the library folder, it will appear with all the basic instruments in the Library Box.

The Options Menu gives you access to some of the Player basics, e.g. the size of the interface, audio engine, handling... For more information read the ‘Kontakt Player 2 Manual’ in the documents folder or go to www.galaxypianos.com.

Purge analyzes which samples were used in an arrangement, and removes from RAM any samples that weren’t used. Click on the downward arrow to access the following functions. „Reset Markers“: Deletes all “tags” that mark samples as used. „Update Sample Pool“: Unloads unused Samples from RAM, and loads newly marked Samples in RAM. „Purge All Samples“: Unloads all Samples from RAM. „Reload All Samples“: Reloads all Samples used in an Instrument.

The ‘View’ button offers three different sizes for interface size. You can adjust the three presets in the Options Menu.

Clicking on this button in the Master Control will instantly zoom onto the currently selected instrument and will hide all other areas of the KP2 Interface.

4. LOADING instruments: In GII you won’t find any multis, except the one that says ‘it’s all in the instruments’, which is true! The way GII is designed means there is no need for multis because you have access to all sounds and controls via the instrument. There are different ways of loading GII’s instruments into the player, let’s start with the most convenient one:

1. If you click on the arrows just to the right of the Instruments button in the Library Box, the content of the library will appear in an easy-to-use menu. A click with your mouse and it’ll be loaded

2. If you click on the Instruments button itself, all instruments will be displayed below in the Browser: Double click on one, and it’s going to be loaded.

3. With the Load/Save button on top of the player you can navigate with „load...“ to the place on your harddrive (if you remember), where all the instruments are and load them.

4. After loading an instrument, you can reach the same pop-up menu, like in the browser, when clicking on the down arrow on the left of the instrument name.

5. Finally, after loading an instrument, you can switch to the following instrument by using the left/right arrows on the right of the instrument name.

(You can find more detailed information about installation, authorization, plug in formats, options, etc; in the ‘Kontakt Player 2 Manual’ in the documents folder or go to www.galaxypianos.com for downloads). Let’s have a look at GII’s NKI.s: You won’t find a lot of NKIs in the instrument folders, because all different style or effect presets are where they belong: in a global preset menu within GII. Basically there are three groups of samples used in GII: the Basic Samples including the dry tones, all ‘noises’ and overtones and five basic Pads. Plus there are Soft Pedal Samples and all Pad Samples.

A. VIENNA GRAND IMPERIAL NKIs:

The ‘VIENNA ALL’ nki contains all samples, so it’s possible to use Soft Pedal Samples with the Una Corda Pedal and the other 15 Pads, which also extends the possibilities of the Warp Engine as you’ll find out later. The Basic NKIs do not contain Soft Pedal Samples and feature only the 5 basic Pads. Because the Vienna Grand is based on a Bösendorfer Imperial with an extra low octave; you will find two basic NKIs, the ‘VIENNA 88 KEYS BASIC‘ with its the regular 88 keys and the ‘VIENNA 97 KEYS BASIC‘ which includes the extended low octave, meaning a total of 97 keys. In case you’re not interested in Una Corda and the extended low octave but want to use all options of the Warp Engine, you should choose ‘VIENNA BASIC WITH ALL PADS‘.

B. 1929 GERMAN BABY GRAND NKIs:

It’s pretty much the same with the 1929 German Baby Grand. ‘BABY GRAND ALL’ includes Soft Pedal Samples and all Pads. ‘BABY GRAND BASIC’ does not contain Soft Pedal and features just the basic 5 Pads. The ‘BABY GRAND BASIC WITH ALL PADS’ adds the remaining Pads to the basic NKI.

C. GALAXY STEINWAY NKIs:

The GALAXY STEINWAY has not been recorded with Una Corda Pedal, so the difference between ‘GALAXY STEINWAY ALL’ and ‘GALAXY STEINWAY BASIC’ is just the number of the Pads.

D. GALAXY STEINWAY 5_1 NKIs:

That also applies to the ‘GALAXY STEINWAY 5_1’ recorded in 5.1 surround. There is just one more instrument in the 5_1 folder called ‘ROUTING CHECK’. If you press C3 with this instrument loaded you will hear a voice telling you the names of the output channels (left/right/center/LFE/left surround/right surround), so you can check if you have the right output routing. But enough of installation, authorization, formats, options and loading procedures! If you managed to get through all that, this is what you might see:

5. GALAXY II’s Instrument-Interface:

Let’s start with the basic Player features, before talking about the instrument itself:

In the upper part of the interface you can see the Instrument Name

and the left/right arrows next to it, allowing you to step through the NKIs.

Underneath the Instrument Name you can choose Output and

Midi Channel,

assign and watch the number of Voices

and see how much Memory is used.

With the ‘S’ button - you can solo the instrument

with the ‘M’ button - you can mute it.

The ‘Tune’ knob tunes up or down in cents or halftones (which is possible in GII as well),

the left/right slider is for panning

and the fader on the right for changing the volume

This meter shows you the output level.

The ‘x’ in the top right hand corner closes the instrument,

the ‘-‘/minus button closes the edit view

and ‘Aux’ opens the auxiliary sends, assigning the aux channels in the Output Menu.

The gear icon on the upper left leads to Instrument Options, giving you access to the voice steal mode, midi transpose, key and velocity range, DFD settings, controller assignment and player info. Because you don’t necessarily need to change any of these, we would once again like to refer you to the ‘Kontakt Player 2 Manual’ in the document folder.

One feature, which you might find helpful when navigating through the instrument, is the Help Window on the left hand side of the interface, which welcomes you after startup. If you click on any button or knob within the instrument, you’ll see a short ‘about’ info telling you what the chosen controller or menu is good for.

6. GLOBAL PRESETS

7. MAIN MENU

Because there are quite a few parameters in GII which you might want to, but not necessarily, need to change, we chose to have a MAIN MENU with all the main parameters and 11 SUBMENUS with everything you (n)ever thought about changing! After loading an instrument you will see the Main Menu with its 6 Menu Buttons:

In the diagram of the MAIN MENU above, the ‘MAIN’ button is highlighted. The other menu buttons TONE, ANATOMY, NOISES, SPACE and WARP are both buttons for entering the submenus and titles for the controllers underneath. For example, the knobs ‘Colour’ and ‘Reso.’ belong to the ‘TONE’ section and the ‘Dynamic’ knob and the ‘Velocity Editor’ button belong to the Anatomy section. Let’s go through the MAIN MENU‘s CONTROLS:

A. The Main Menu’s TONE Section:

If you turn the Colour knob to the right, you will hear the piano sound ‘harder’ and crispier with more ‘attack’. Turned anticlockwise it’ll sound ‘warmer’, ‘softer’ and with less ‘attack’. This is not due to EQ-ing, what you are hearing are different sounding samples, with no change or restriction in dynamics. This is what we call ‘one knob control of tone colour’. The ‘Reso’ knob underneath refers to the volume of the pianos RESONANCE. When using the sustain pedal on a real piano, it raises all the dampers at once so that all strings can vibrate sympathetically, adding a much fuller but less distinct sound to the played notes. We sampled the sympathetic resonance separately so that you can change its volume without affecting the ‘dry tones’ using the ‘RESO’ knob of GALAXY II’s tone section.

Underneath the Help Window there is a pop-up menu called ‘GLOBAL PRESETS’. It offers you 4 types of helpful presets.

A. STYLES The Styles Presets don’t use any of the Pads or the warp section. . They create sounds appropriate for different music styles. For example the ‘Vienna Compressed Pop’ will work very well in a dense pop arrangement by using the pop-compressor, reducing the dynamics and giving the piano a more brilliant sound with a harder attack by changing tone colour and loudness. On the contrary, the ‘Vienna Creamy Hall’ creates a warm and soft sound using ‘tone colour’ and ‘warmth’ and ‘closes’ the lid, reducing the stereo width and ‘placing’ the piano in a chamber music hall fairly far away from the microphones.

B. PLAYING WITH PADS This one offers the combination of grand piano and a couple of pads, fitting the piano’s tone section to the chosen Pad.

C. WARPED PIANOS ‘Warped Pianos’ are pianos, which have been modified via the Warp engine. The ‘Piano Bass’ for instance, is a mixture of piano and double bass depending on the velocity. ‘Flange Funk’ uses the Warps ‘Spiritualizer’ to modulate the piano, combined with a tougher sound and light compression. If you are looking for FX sounds, which basically sound like a grand piano, choose one of these.

D. TOTALLY WARPED With the ‘Totally Warped’ presets it’s pretty hard to hear that this was ever a piano, these presets are real FX sounds - give them a try!

At the top of the list is the preset ‘Reset’. This resets ALL parameters of GII, so be careful with this one!

If you load any presets and want to save them, you have to save the instrument as a User Instrument, not as a preset. After saving it to the path

you will find those in the ‘User Instruments’ pop-up menu in the Library Box. When saving it to the libraries Instrument Folder it will appear in the Library Box together with the original instruments.

B. The Main Menu’s ANATOMY Section:

C. The Main Menu’s NOISES Section:

D. The Main Menu’s SPACE Section:

E. The Main Menus WARP Section:

In the ANATOMY menu (which we’ll get to a bit later), you can control the pianos dynamics, match it to your keyboard and control pitch etc. From the main menu you have direct ‘one knob’ control of the Dynamic range without affecting the pianos volume. Turning the Dynamics knob anticlockwise reduces the dynamic range. The upper range, meaning the loudest notes, stays the same, but the more you turn it to the left, the louder the soft notes will get. This is very helpful for instance when playing a pop piano within a dense arrangement where you can’t use low dynamics simply because you won’t hear them. Turning the Dynamics knob to the very left gives all notes pretty much the same ‘loudness’ independent of key velocity. Turned clockwise, the knob leads to an expansion of the dynamic range. Again, the loudest note stays the same, you just have to push the keys harder to get there and it’s easier to reach the softest samples. Adjusting GALAXY II to your keyboard isn’t a question of just a few presets. We wanted to offer you a lot more flexibility with GALAXY II’s Velocity Editor. Clicking this button allows you to enter a complex menu page, but we’ll come back to that later.

Hitting a string within a piano is not an aseptic event. When hitting a key the damper leaves the string, then the hammer strikes it and immediately afterwards rebounds into a resting position. When releasing the key, the damper comes down onto the string again, but does not halt the strings energy right away and the damper is not able to stop the resonance, which was created within the instrument; so the sound sort of dies away which takes time- especially the low strings. At the same time, pressing the sustain pedal raises all dampers at once and ‘thrums’ each string lightly. Pressing any pedal leads to some low frequency resonance of the whole piano. All these noises are part of the piano sound and you can use them or not! The advantage of using GALAXYII is not just that you have all these authentic noises at your fingertips, but that can switch them on or off and even control their volume, when entering the Noises Submenu. From the main menu you can switch on the release samples (‘the dying string’), the hammer noise (the hammer falling back into its resting position), the damper noise (the damper noise is generated when pressing and releasing the sustain pedal) and the string noise (the vibration of all strings triggered by the dampers when using the sustain pedal).

GII’S SPACE Section offers two different Reverb Engines: The IR Reverb- a Convolution Reverb, based on impulse responses meaning ‘sampled’ room acoustics and the ECO Verb, which does not recreate acoustic spaces as real the IR Verb, but which works very well within a pop mix and does not use as much CPU power. With the Send knob you can control the Reverb Level. In the Space-Sub Menu you can choose the Reverb presets and adjust the Predelay and Reverb size.

GII includes the sophisticated WARP effects engine. This contains 4 FX machines. In the GLOBAL PRESETS you will find numerous Warp Presets from piano-pad combinations to completely alterated sounds. Since the WARP is an instrument in its own right, you have to go into the special menu for editing. In the Main Menus Warp Menu you’ll find the Bypass Warp button for bypassing the whole engine, the Reset Warp button for resetting all machines and the Random Warp button, whereupon GII’s warp engine offers you new Warp sounds with every click. This comes in useful if you don’t want to edit a sound yourself but you want to leave the presets behind. You just push the Random Warp button and listen to what GII’s comes up with. Make sure that your speakers are not turned up too loud because the Random Warp algorithm can generate some loud sounds!

8. TONE MENU

All three grand pianos have been recorded ‘the way they are’. We used a combination of different microphone settings to expose each instrument’s character but there’s no EQ or compression on the samples: that, and a whole lot more, is in your hands when you enter GII’s TONE MENU.

A. Colour: Let’s check out the ‘Colour’ knob again. As mentioned earlier, this knob is not an EQ at all; it uses different samples for different settings. To let the cat out of the bag, it’s a dynamic way of mapping, while balancing the volume differences between softer and harder samples. As a result of turning the ‘Colour’ knob clockwise, you will hear the piano sound ‘harder’, crispier, and with ‘more attack’. Turn it anticlockwise and it’ll sound ‘warmer’, ‘softer’ and with less ‘attack’. All without losing dynamics, and with barely any volume changes between soft and hard. It’s ‘One-Knob Control of Tone Colour’.

B. Resonance: How about a little excursion into grand piano mechanics:

We sampled the sympathetic string resonance with the damper pedal down separately, without the dry tone. Its volume is controlled by the Tone-sections ‘Reso.’ knob. You can change its volume without affecting the ‘dry tones’. In this way you can control the pianos ‘liveliness’: keep it pure, make it very resonant or with the so called ‘Ghost Mode’ in the Warp Section’s Alterizer- you also can play just the resonance without the dry tones! When the Reso.-knob is turned to the very left, the resonance is completely switched off .

C. Warmth & Punch: There are three more knobs in the tone section affecting the sound, two of which are quite easy to describe: ‘Warmth’ and ‘Punch’. They affect certain sound areas, pretty well explained by their names. Using these, you can adjust the pianos sound to suit your tastes and to fit the musical context. Turn the knobs and have a listen!

Damper Pedal and Sympathetic String Resonance

The pedal on the far right of a grand piano is called the damper pedal because pressing it raises all the dampers at once. Any notes played while the damper pedal is down blend together and sustain until they die out naturally. Or until you release the pedal and the dampers kill the swinging strings. A single note

played with the damper pedal down sounds different, more pure than the same note with the pedal up. This is because releasing the dampers from the neighbouring strings allows them to vibrate sympathetically, adding a much fuller, but less distinct sound to the note.

D. Loudness Let’s take a closer look at ‘Loudness’:

Equal Loudness Contour The human auditory system is sensitive to frequencies from 20 Hz to a maximum of approx. 20,000 Hz. Within this range, the human ear is most sensitive between 1 and 5 kHz, and it’s less sensitive to bass and treble at low volumes than at high volumes. The figure on the left shows how ‘loud’ you have to turn up your speakers (SPL) to get the same subjective loudness feeling (phon) in relation the frequency. As you can see, low and high frequencies ‘feel’ more quiet that mid frequencies at a lower speaker volume. The Loudness button on your Hifi is meant to compensate for this- it ‘pushes’ the low and high frequencies.

We wanted to incorporate a Loudness button into GII, but because it’s not really meant to just compensate our ears’ ‘inaccessibility’ but for sound design, it’s controlled with a knob, so that you can ‘push’ low and high frequencies as desired.

E. Low Keys: It’s always a question of taste how much intensity the low keys on a grand piano have. We recorded the low strings as they really are, however with the Vienna Grand for example, they might sound too intense (for a pop arrangement…) or maybe you want to add more. That’s where the ‘Low Keys’ knob comes in- it pushes or reduces the low keys (lower than middle C) in volume: the lower the key, the stronger the effect.

F. Lid: With a grand piano you can position the instruments Lid in three positions: open, half closed and closed, which obviously affects the sound. But in what way?

G. Pedals/Soft Pedal: Moving on to the next button of GII’s Tone-Section, let’s talk a little bit about PEDALS:

Pedals: Usually grand pianos have three pedals. We talked about the one on the very right already: the Damper or so-called Sustain Pedal. It raises all dampers at once and let’s you sustain the played notes without having to hold the keys, also leading to sympathetic resonance of the strings, which are not played. GII’s ‘Reso.’ Knob adds this resonance.

The middle pedal is called the Sostenuto pedal. It’s also used to sustain notes, unlike the damper pedal the sostenuto pedal does not lift any dampers, but holds only those ones, which are already lifted when the pedal is pressed. Notes played after the pedal is pressed behave in the usual manner. For example, you could play a chord in the bass as a ‘pedal point’, press the sostenuto pedal to sustain those notes and then use both hands to improvise on it in the usual way without sustain, while the original chord sustains, until you release the pedal. The pedal on the left is the Una Corda pedal, also called the soft pedal. When you press the soft pedal, all keys shift slightly to the right so that in the upper bass the hammers strike only one of the two strings and in the treble, the hammers strike only two of the three strings. Having fewer strings hit per note makes the notes not just quieter, but also changes the timbre. That's because a two-string unison simply sounds different, more hollow, than a three-string unison, and because the hammers are now hitting the strings with a less-used part of the hammer surface, generating a softer timbre.

Lid In a grand piano, the string vibrations are transmitted through bridges to the soundboard, which amplifies them, so the radiation of sound from a grand piano is determined by its soundboard, but is changed by reflections from the lid. In the lower registers the sound radiation is fairly symmetrical. In mid frequencies, the open lid starts to reflect sounds out of the instrument with greater directivity and in the horizontal plane, they’re radiated pretty symmetrically too. The upper registers of the instrument are much more strongly affected by the lid, with a strong directivity between 15 and 35 degrees from the horizontal towards the front. Above and below these limits, the upper harmonics can be as much as 10dB below the maximum found 'on-axis'. The changes to the sound radiation when the piano lid is closed are fairly obvious. The sound becomes duller as the high frequencies cannot radiate as effectively and the overall level decreases slightly. If the lid is half open, the overall effect is of a slightly duller sound projection, without the full brilliance and clarity of which the instrument is capable.

GII’s Lid-function simulates this effect, offering those three lid positions. And if you say ‘I’d never play with a closed lid!’, start experimenting with it, especially, when turning the tone-colour to the left to produce a real warm and intimate sound.

If you have three pedals, they usually output Midi Controller #64 for the Sustain Pedal, #66 for the Sostenuto Pedal and #67 for the Soft Pedal. In GII, MidiCC #64 (Sustain) and #66 (Sostenuto) sustain the played notes and trigger the corresponding resonance samples. If you press the Soft Pedal button (Midi cc #67) with the Vienna Grand and the Baby Grand, you will hear different samples because we sampled those two grand pianos with soft pedal up and down. The reason is that you can’t really simulate the impression of a real Una Corda Pedal by just using some sort of filter. The Una Corda sound isn’t just quieter and duller, its timbre is really different, more hollow, less full. In case you don’t have a Soft pedal with you keyboard, but want to play the samples, go to the Tone Section and hit the ‘Soft Pedal’ button; from then on you will just hear Una Corda samples. Please keep in mind that the ‘BASIC’ instruments don’t have Una Corda Samples, so you have to load the ‘ALL’ NKIs.

H. Compressor: Finally we get to GII’s COMPRESSOR. Especially in Pop Music, but also in Jazz, a compressor is a very important sound tool, not just a dynamic one.

Compressors are one of the most common audio processors of all. A Compressor is a specialized amplifier used to reduce dynamic range. When sound enters a compressor and exceeds a certain Threshold, its volume is being reduced within a certain Ratio. The sooner a compressor reacts after excess of threshold, the faster is its Attack Time. And the quicker it returns to its original gain after the input signal has fallen below threshold, the shorter the Release Time. Now, if for example a compressor has a low threshold and a high ratio, the input signal will be reduced strongly and very early on. If you then choose a short attack time, the sound will be affected within the tones attack phase and the instruments attack will sound different. If you now add a short release time the tone’s envelope will quickly return to its normal gain. This will result in a so-called ‘pumping’ sound. With a longer release time the result will be more like a ‘breathing’ envelope.

This basically applies to the whole GII TONE MENU: EXPERIMENT with all the parameters, try different combinations, go to extremes to hear the contrasts. Or use the Global Presets and experience it all from there!

9. ANATOMY MENU Anatomy, coming from the Greek anatomia (to cut up, cut open) is ‘the science of the shape and structure of organisms and their parts’. Our organism is GALAXY II and talking about its anatomy is talking about its design regarding playability and structure. Let’s have a look:

A. Width & Listening Position: ‘Stereo-Width’ expands or collapses the stereo field of GII, it sets the width of the stereo field. Turning left closes it in and when turned fully anticlockwise, the signal becomes mono. Positive values push the stereo spread outward like a stereo enhancer. The way the samples in GALAXY II are panned are with the bass notes on the left end the treble on the right, corresponding to the listening position of the player. Using the ‚Listening Position’ button swaps left and right and in this way switching to the listening position of the audience!

So a compressor, besides controlling the dynamic range, changes a sound’s envelope and in this way the sound itself. That’s why you’ll find our compressor in the Tone Menu, because in GII compression is about sound, not controlling dynamics. You won’t find controls for ratio, attack, release or threshold with GII’s compressor. We merged those parameters into one knob and a few presets. So the Compressor knob is not just for Threshold, but for a combination of all important parameters, depending on the musical preset you select. You can hear it in a couple of the Global Presets. The best way is to just experiment with it, because it’s a question of taste and musical context.

If , for example, you want to position the piano in a concert hall with the listener quite far away, it would make sense to switch to the ‘audience listening position’, reduce the stereo field by turning ‘Width’ way to the left and then adding a fair amount of IR Reverb from the Space Section. Before we talk about dynamics and velocity, we’d like to tackle the other parameters of the Anatomy Section. Since the Velocity Editor will demand some attention, let ’s deal with the Tuning Division first.

B. Pitch & Tunings:

When playing an electronic device you will usually use the ‘Standart A’ of 440 Hz. But if, for example, you were to play with a small or large classical ensemble ,or accompanying woodwind instruments, you might need to change your Concert A, which you can do using GII’s ‘Basic Pitch’.

C. Transpose & Finetune: When music is in a particular key, it may be difficult to play or too high or low to sing comfortably. ‘Transpose’ shifts the key in halftones within 3 octaves, wheras ‘Finetune’ allows a pitchshift within +/- 50cents.

D. Sympathetic String Resonance: We’ve already talked about “Sympathetic String resonance” in the tone section, where we explained usage of the Resonance-knob. Basically, string resonance means that strings may resonate at their fundamental or overtone frequencies when other strings are triggered. For example, an A string at 440 Hz will cause an E string at 330 Hz to resonate because they share an overtone of 1320 Hz (3rd overtone of A and 4th overtone of E). Now, when you play and hold a key, the corresponding damper is lifted so that the string can

With GII’s ‘Tunings’ pop-up menu you can choose from a variety of different historical tunings. The only tuning system, which is used today, is the equal temperament, which is the only one allowing you to play in every key and modulate and transpose wherever you want to. But especially with ‘old’ classical music it might be interesting to try some of the historical tunings. Have a look at our ‘About Tuning Systems’ low-down.

About Tuning Systems A tuning system is the system used to define which tones or pitches, to use when playing music. In other words, it is the choice of number and spacing of frequency values which are used. Due to the psychoacoustic properties of tone, various pitch combinations will sound more or less ‘natural’ when used in combination. For example, a tone caused by a vibration twice the speed of another forms the natural sounding octave. Another natural resonance found in musical scales the world over is the ratio of 1:3 which is often called a perfect fifth. Now here’s the problem with tuning any musical instrument: if you tune a circle of pure fifths (a frequency relation of 1:3) ‘c - g - d - a - e - b - f# - c# - g# - d# - a# - f – c’, the c you end up at is not exactly in tune with the one you started with - a mathematical anomaly known as a comma. To solve this problem, the modern western world uses an ‘equal temperament’ which divides the octave into 12 equal intervals. In other words, in an equal temperament, all the notes in the scale are shifted by the same amount in order to resolve the problem. The main advantage of equal temperament is that you can play and transpose notes and melodies in any key, the disadvantage is that the only remaining ‘pure’ interval is the octave. In other tuning systems the notes in the scale are shifted by differing amounts, giving each temperament a certain character. For example in the earliest tuning system- the PYTHAGOREAN tuning, almost all the fourths and fifths are dead in tune and the entire comma is 'dumped' on the interval between F and B flat, which is therefore unusable. But octave, fourth and fith are pure. By the early 17th century MEANTONE temperament was the norm. In this temperament the major thirds are perfectly in tune and the fourths and fifths slightly compromised - except for one catastrophic fifth, usually between G sharp and E flat, called the 'wolf'. The wolf in meantone tuning is so horrible and such an obstacle that, by the later seventeenth century, it was being modified substantially in practice, for example with the Silbermann tuning, where the pure thirds of meantone are de-tuned a little bit in order to try and lessen the wolf.

Concert Pitch The ‘A’ above middle C is often called ‘Basic Pitch’ or ‘Concert A’ and is set at 440 cycles per second or 440 Hertz (often written as ‘A = 440 Hz’ or sometimes ‘A440’). This Standard Pitch is a universal frequency or note that all instruments are set to. A form of standard pitch has been around ever since two individuals wished to play two instruments together. A tuning fork was and is,often used to set the pitch. Modern science began to measure pitch accuracy in cycles per second around 1834 when a group of German physicists using a mechanical stroboscopic device found that the pitch of the tuning fork that they were testing was at A440 cps. It was only later that the frequency was expressed in Hz. The pitch of A440 has remained the standard since 1939, especially in electronic instruments. Among orchestras though the used pitch varies: 440HZ is used in the USA and England, 442 in Continental European Orchestras and 444Hz in Germany or Austria. And in the course of time there was a continuous tendency for pitch levels to rise. Meaning that before the 20th century concert pitch was sometimes way lower than 440Hz.

vibrate freely. Let’s go back to our example of playing the Concert A at 440Hz. If you now play the E underneath with 330Hz, the free A string will start to resonate sympathetically with their shared overtone of 1320 Hz, an E two octaves above the triggering E. We programmed this system up to the 4th overtone and you can switch it on using the ‘SSR’ button. Unlike other piano libraries, GII does not ‘generate’ (we could also say ‘fake’) overtones from the dry tones. We sampled the grand pianos overtones for each key. So with GII you have Sympathetic String Resonance with ‘REAL OVERTONES’.

E. Repedalling Repedalling or ‘Pedal Catch’ refers to a situation, where you release a key and then push the sustain pedal while the note is in its release phase. In this way the ‘remaining’ sound sustains and as all dampers are being raised, you will hear the other strings resonating. We’ve already mentioned the release phase in the Main Menu’s Noise Section: when a key is released, the damper can’t stop the string vibration right away and so the string ‘dies’, we call this- the release phase. The release phase is much longer in bass notes than in the mid and treble range. The same applies to repedalling: the longer the release phase, the longer the time within which repedalling occurs. And the stronger the string vibration after releasing the key the stronger the effect of repedalling. So the strength of repedalling depends on the time between releasing a key and pressing the pedal, and on velocity and key position, because the release phase is stronger the lower the key. So, this is what happens when you press the ‘Repedalling’ button in the Anatomy section.

F. Silent Key If you press a key very softly on a real piano, the hammer won’t make it to the string and you won’t hear a tone. ‘Silent Key’ does the same in GII. This function is useful, if you just want to play around with Sympathic String Resonances, because they are still active also with silent key.

G. Dynamic Now let’s go back to the dynamic section. In the context of the Main Menu we already talked about GII’s dynamics-knob, described as ‘one knob-control of the dynamic range’. It changes the instruments dynamic response on incoming keyboard velocities without affecting the pianos volume. Turning the Dynamics knob anticlockwise reduces the dynamic range. The upper range, meaning the loudest notes, stay the same. The more you turn it to the left however, the louder the soft notes will get. This is useful when playing a pop piano within a dense arrangement, where you can’t use low dynamics, simply because you won’t hear them. Turning the Dynamics poti all the way to the left, gives all notes pretty much the same ‘loudness’ independent of key velocity. On the other hand, turning the knob to the right, leads to an expansion of the dynamic range. Again the loudest note stays the same, you just have to push the keys harder to get there, and it’s easier to reach to the softest samples.

H. Velocity Editor: Galaxy II features a special Velocity Editor so you can customize GALAXY II’s velocity response to your keyboard and your way of playing. You enter it by clicking on the ‘Velocity Editor’ button within the Anatomy Menu. On the right you can see a graph showing the current velocity curve. The horizontal X-axis represents the incoming velocity and the vertical Y-axis the corresponding output velocity after modification in the velocity editor:

The Allround Curve works in many situations. It’s a linear curve which can be bent using the Curve Knob. This result’s in a harder or softer way of playing. In addition to that you can shift the curve up or down by using the Offset Parameter.

If you want to edit the velocity curve in detail, click into the graph and draw your own velocity curve.

For faster editing, simply use one of our preconfigured curve types. Use the Curve Menu to choose the curve type you prefer. Here is a detailed explanation of every type:

There are two additional linear velocity curves available called Linear Curve 1 and Linear Curve 2. Unlike the Allround Curve, the two Linear Curves aren’t bendable. Instead the Curve Knob controls the slope of the curves. Again the curve can also be shifted by using the Offset Parameter.

When using a very sensitive keyboard of playing a soft song it would be a good idea to use the Soft Curve 1 or Soft Curve 2. The goal of both curves is make softer velocities easier to be played. Bend the curves with Curve Knob as you desire or shift them via Offset Parameter.

Now let’s have a look at the 3 Split Curves, a unique function in Galaxy II. When selecting a Split Curve the velocity curve will be split in 4 to 6 zones plus velocity 127. By clicking into the velocity graph and holding the mouse button you can easily shift the different velocity zones up and down. For easier editing of velocity 127 you might want to use the Vel. 127 Parameter. After all velocities zones have been adjusted to the right position, click on the Smooth Button. Now all of the zones will be connected to a velocity curve. Not smooth enough? Just click on the Smooth Button again and the Velocity Editor will smooth the curve again. Note that the Curve Knob is not available when using a Split Curve.

The last preconfigured curve is the Fixed Velocity curve, which means that there is only one velocity step available. Choose your desired fixed velocity level by using the Offset Parameter.

10. NOISES Menu Hitting a string within a piano is not an aseptic event. Part of the piano sound is made up of the mechanical noises, caused by the pianos mechanics: The action of a piano is a mechanism which translates the depression of the piano keys into a felt hammer striking the strings. When you press a key, its back end rises and pushes up on a complex little mechanism, called the wippen. It’s made of wooden levers, springs, felt, hinges, and screws, which pushes with the jack on the hammer and drives it upward toward the string. The hammer is pushed almost all the way to the string but then at the last moment the hammer is sent into free flight. After striking the string, the hammer rebounds to an intermediate resting position until you release the key. At that point, the hammer returns all the way to rest. Aside from activating the hammer, the back of the key also lifts a felt damper off of the string just before the string is hit. When the key is released, the damper drops back onto the string to muffle it. Ideally, the damper should stop the sound immediately, but in the real world, one or two small pieces of felt are no match for the energy generated by a loudly vibrating piano string, especially the longer, more powerful bass strings. Moreover, the damper can't really stop the resonance that is generated within the body of the instrument. The cut-off is therefore not always entirely clean, especially after a forceful staccato note. When you use the damper pedal, all dampers are raised at once, whereby the corresponding strings are twitched a little bit and start resonating with their resonance frequency. Additonally every pedal causes some low frequency noise within the instrument. All these noises are part of the piano sound if you like it or not! The advantage, using GALAXY II, is not just that you have all those typical noises at your fingertips, but that can switch them on or off and even control their volume.

A. Release Samples When hitting a key, the damper leaves the string. When releasing the key, the damper comes down to the string again. The energy generated by a loudly vibrating piano string, especially by the longer more powerful bass strings, can’t be stopped by the small felt damper right away. So the sound just sort of ‘dies away’, which takes some time especially in the low strings. With the Boesendorfer, the low strings even make the dampers bounce because there is so much energy! In the higher midrange you can hear more string resonance coming from other strings than of the actual sound of the ‘dying‘ string sound. The strength of this ‘Release Phase’ depends on the key position, on the velocity the key is being hit and on the time between hitting the key and releasing it. We sampled the release phase with different velocities and different time offsets to create a strong release ‘noise’ when playing strong staccato notes without making softer notes sound unnatural.

B. Hammer Noises After striking the string, the hammer drops back to an intermediate resting position. The noise of this rebound is part of the normal dry tone and can not be changed. When releasing the key, the hammer returns all the way to rest. This noise, which happens along with the Release Sample, is called ‘Hammer Noise’ and can be switched on and off and adjusted.

C. Damper Noise The Damper Pedal raises all dampers from the strings at once when pressed and drops them back on the strings when released. Both result in a short ‘Damper Noise’, which can also be switched on and off and is fully adjustable.

D. Pedal Noises Because the pedals in a grand piano are such strong mechanisms, they transfer a lot of energy to the whole piano body and the soundboard, resulting in some low frequency resonance. If you connected a subwoofer to your monitor system, you would ‘feel’ them!

E. String Noise When the dampers leave the strings after pressing the damper pedal, each damper pulls its corresponding string a little bit, resulting in vibration of each string with its resonance frequency. When played loud this ‘noise’ is barely noticeable. When playing very soft however, this resonance triggered by the dampers seems louder than the resonance initiated by the played notes. As with the ‘Damper Noise’, we sampled ‘String Noise’ a couple of times and triggered them randomly.

11. SPACE Menu If you want to add some Room space to your playing, the Space Section is your tool. In this menu you can edit GALAXY II’s two reverb processors in detail. When opening the Space Section your instrument should look like this:

To add a reverb effect to your piano first choose between the IR Reverb or the ECO Verb by clicking the corresponding button.

The primary goal of a convolution or ‘IR Reverb’ is to sample real spaces, in order to simulate the acoustics of the sampled space. These spaces are 'captured' using a special sweep tone played by a speaker and recorded by microphones in the actual space, or by firing an alarm pistol and recording that with microphones. A convolution reverb adds this same ‘impression‘ to any sound that it is used on, the ‘impression’ being what the room did to the gunshot or sweep. This sample is called an Impulse Response, in short: IR; it’s a bit like the a rooms ‘fingerprint’. GII offers 21 ‘fingerprints’ in the IR Preset Menu.* When loading the Galaxy Steinway 5.1 in surround, there will be 5 additional IRs in the presets, which are sampled in 5.0 . An IR Reverb is unbeatable in quality and realism when it comes to simulating real acoustic spaces like concert halls, churches or studio rooms. Convolution can, however, require great amouts of cpu power especially when using large rooms. Please keep that in mind. Some of GII’s IRs are taken from the DVD “Halls of Fame”, distributed by Best Service.

For users who want to save on cpu power or simply like the sound of a normal digital reverb unit, we have included the ECO Verb. Only one of the two reverbs units can be active at the same time. For example if you activate the ECO Verb with an already activated IR Reverb, the IR Reverb will be automatically deactivated. Now the reverb is ready to be used. Just play some notes on your keyboard and you should hear the piano in your chosen room. Maybe the reverb’s too quiet or too loud? In both cases the Send Knob will help you. It controls the volume of the audio signal that is sent into the reverb unit. Two further knobs of importance are: the Length Knob; this controls the length of the reverb signal. Use it to increase or reduce the room’s size. And the PreDelay Knob which is used to control the delay between the original audio signal and the reverb signal. By delaying the onset of the reverb, you can simulate what an early reflection does. Using pre-delay adds clarity and greater depth to an instrument.

12. The Warp Section As mentioned earlier: GALAXY II includes 5 FX Machines, which can be found in the so called Warp Section. You can enter this sub menu by clicking on the Warp Button on the top right of the instrument. After clicking the button, your instrument will look like this:

As you can see, all the Warp Controls from the Main Menu (the Random Warp Button, the Bypass Warp Button and the Reset Warp Button) have moved to the bottom of the instrument. The Bypass Warp button bypasses the whole engine and the Reset Warp button resets all machines. When using the Random Warp button, GII’s warp engine offers you a new Warp sound with every click. So if you don’t want to edit a sound yourself but want to leave the presets behind, just push the Random Warp button and listen to what GII comes up with! In the centre you will see five new buttons. Clicking on them activates the corresponding Warp Machine. In addition to that, a Preset Menu and an Edit Button pop up when switching on a Warp Machine. Here’s an example of what your screen should look like:

Now, after powering up the machine, click on the Edit Button to bring up the machine’s interface on the screen and to edit it in detail. If you want to go back, click on the Warp Button. It’s important to know that deactivating a machine (clicking on the button with its name again) is like bypassing it. It won’t use cpu power anymore (and it won’t affect the sound), but it will remember its settings. So if you activate the machine again, all your settings will return. If you want to reset the settings, open the corresponding Preset Menu and choose the Reset Preset. If you want to reset all machines, use the Reset Warp-Button. The signal flow of the Warp Section can’t be changed. The signal first enters the Pad-Machine, then the Degrader, then the Spiritualizer and so on.

A. The Pad-Machine The Pad-Machine is an easy-to-use sample player, which is designed to play atmospheric pad sounds. After clicking on the Pad-Machine’s Edit Button, your screen should look like this:

Use the Select Pad Menu to a choose your desired pad sound and start playing: your piano will be accompanied by pads. A simple, but effective way to add more depth to your sound. If the pad’s volume is not to your taste , no problem: simply use the Volume Knob on the right! The Pad-Machine also includes a special low-pass filter. Use the Cutoff Knob to change the cutoff frequency. A value of 100 means that the filter is completely open. The Release Knob controls the release time of the pads (the time it takes the pad sound to fade out after releasing the key that triggered it). Now let’s move on to two special parameters: Fatness and Voices. Both are very effective for making your pad sound bigger. The Voices parameter ranges from 1 to 7. 1 means that only one pad sample is triggered when hitting a key. 7 means that 7 pad samples are triggered, equally panned from left to right. Ok, now on to the Fatness parameter because this parameter only works with Voices that have a value of 2 or higher. Fatness ranges from 0 to 100. Increasing this value pans the voices hard left and right of the stereo image and also slightly detunes them in relation to each other. All instruments have 5 basic pads integrated. If you use one of the “… ALL” or “… WITH ALL PADS” NKIs, you will find a total of 20 Pad Sounds. We limited the basic NKIs to 5 Pads to save RAM, if you want more pads, just load one of the other instruments.

B. The Degrader The next machine we come to is the Degrader. The Degrader features all tools needed to distort, deform and destroy your audio signal. Have a look at its interface:

Let’s cover all controls from left to right. First, there’s the Roughness Knob. Simply turn it clockwise and your signal will be distorted and some noise will be added. To add more variety to the Roughness Knob, we have included the R. Color (Roughness Color) parameter, which influences the sound of the distortion and the noise. A higher R. Color value (it ranges from 0 to 100) results in a warmer, less hard sounding distortion. Hacker works similarly to a bit crusher. The higher the Hacker value is (it ranges from 0 100), the less bits are available. High Hacker values result in a very distorted and cut off sound. Whereas the Hacker reduces the bit rate of your audio signal, the Sharpness Knob reduces its sample rate. Turning the knob clockwise adds a sharp sounding touch to your audio signal until it is completely distorted. S. Range (Shifting Range) and S. Time (Shifting Time) are two parameters which work hand-in-hand. They’re used for time controlled pitch shifting.

S. Range defines the number of halftones your piano sound is being pitched up or down to. It ranges from –48 to +48, so you can pitch 4 octaves. S. Time defines the time (in micro-seconds) it takes the pitching process to reach the next halftone. Last but not least, the Degrader includes an effective detuning function. Choose from different detuning settings in the Detuning Menu and the Degrader detunes every key in a random way. Not satisfied with the settings ? Just click on the same menu entry again and all keys will be reset and detuned again. If you want to return to the pianos normal tuning, use the ‘No Detuning’ menu entry.

C. The Spiritualizer After destroying the piano sound, let’s add some spirit to it with the Spiritualizer:

Let’s have a look at the Madness Knob and its corresponding menu first of all. The Madness function creates metallic and flange sounds. Choose a setting from the Madness Menu to select between different effect characters and then turn up the Madness Knob to bring in and increase the effect. To the right, is the Spiritualizer’s Global Multimode Filter, a very flexible filtering unit. Here’s how it works: First use the Filter Menu above the Filter M. (Filter Morph) Knob to choose a filter curve. Then use the Filter M. Knob to morph the filter curve from a horizontal line into the chosen form. With the Cutoff Knob you can now move the filter’s cutoff frequency and the Reso. (Resonance) Knob will boost the frequencies around it. Now to something special: the Ghost Mode. Activating the Ghost Mode deactivates most of the piano’s samples but allows you to play the piano’s resonance, as you would a ‘normal’ sound! This is a great function for creating atmospheric or pad-like sounds.

D. The Alterizer Here’s a complete-morph-in-one-click tool: the Alterizer. It looks like this:

The Alterizer is a simple but very effective Warp Machine. Select a Mutator from the Select Mutator Menu and your audio signal will be completely transformed via impulse response technology. Use the Original Knob to let some of the original audio signal pass through the Alterizer unaltered and use the Volume Knob to control the Alterizer’s output gain. That’s it- simple and effective! (Please note that some Mutators require a lot of cpu power.)

E. The Time Traveller We have come to the last of the Warp Machines: the Time Traveller- a powerful delay unit. After clicking on the Time Traveller’s Edit Button, your screen should look like this:

The first parameter we encounter is the Time Knob. This knob simply controls the delay time (the time between two echoing sounds). The Time Traveller allows delay times between 5 ms and 2,5 sec. Next to the Time Knob is the Damping Knob: the more you turn it clockwise, the more the delay will be low pass filtered. The Pan Knob allows you to create ping pong delays: the delays will jump from one side of the stereo panorama to the other. Turning the knob clockwise increases the effect. The Feedback Knob controls the feedback intensity: more feedback means more delays. Finally we have the Send Knob. This knob controls how much of the audio signal is sent to the Time Traveller. With the Send Knob turned completely to the left, you won’t hear the effect at all. That’s it! You’ve learned the most important things concerning the Warp Section. Now try all parameters, activate different machines simultaneously and see how they work and influence each other. And remember: if you need inspiration- use the Random Warp Button and let Galaxy II’s Random Warp Algorithm warp you into new sound dimensions. It’s a very powerful tool!

Thank you for buying GALAXY II GRAND PIANO COLLECTION. We spent many months with our three ‘piano-babys’, so we really hope you enjoy playing them! Please feel free to make any criticism or suggestions. Simply use our forum at www.galaxypianos.com , where you’ll also find News, Demos, Downloads, Tutorials or FAQs. And if you want to stay informed about Galaxy II or other products of Galaxy-Instruments products, subscribe to our newsletter in the forum or visit us at www.galaxypianos.com , www.galaxypianos.de or www.galaxy-instruments.com . (The German Manual is available for Download at www.galaxypianos.de ) Produced by Uli Baronowsky Concept by Uli Baronowsky & Klaus Baetz Scripting by Klaus Baetz Recorded at Galaxy Studios/Belgium and Hansahaus-Studios/Germany Piano Technician: Andrei Wedel Pianist: Gert Kapo Mixed, edited & programmed at The Badroom by Uli Baronowsky Assistants: Christoph Schmidt, Dominic Raths, Maximilian Fritz Demotracks played by Mark Joggerst and Gert Kapo Trailer & Webdesign by Christoph Schmidt & Dominic Raths Photo - BORGATO CONCERT GRAND PIANO model L 282 Special Thanks to Andrei Wedel, Gert Kapo, Mark Joggerst, Klaus Tenner, Martin Doepke, Xaver Fischer, Klaus Genuit @ Hansahaus Studios, Wilfried van Baaren @ Galaxystudios, Klaus Kandler & everbody @ Best Service, Dan Santucci, Gerald Zollner, Frank Elting & Nicki Marinic @ Native Instruments, Dominic Raths, Christoph Schmid, Borgato/Italy, Monika & Lillianna Dömer