GS3 and # piano voices

[JohnGrant]

Will the GS3 Orchestra version actually improve the number of playable voices in a solo piano situation? I frequently go over 160, esp. with the pedal down. If I knew that Orchestra (unlimited polyphony) would in fact provide unlimited polyphony for, say, the Black Grand, I would check it out. Has anybody actually tried it? And with what processing speed, etc?

JG

[midphase]

How do you go over 160 voices on a solo piano? A real piano only has 88 keys...I'm just curious.

[Alexcremers]

Oh, that's easy! Release triggers!

[gugliel]

How do you go over 160 voices on a solo piano? A real piano only has 88 keys...I'm just curious.

You must never have used gigastudio! It's easy even without the damper pedal -- and with it, trivial. Each note uses a 'voice' for the basic sound, a voice for the release, and who-knows-what for other things. The total voices reported by GS goes very high very fast.

To answer the original question: I just tried on my 1 gigabyte system, putting the pedal down and playing several handsfull of notes -- got up to 256 voices after about 15-20 chords -- so, its not unlimited but the limits are higher with GS3 orchestra, enough so I don't think you can hear the dropouts.

The maximum setting I normally use is 256, and configuring it that high takes away from the total number of instruments you can load (don't know exactly how the tradeoff works: for this test I had a set of instruments registering 50% of total memory used; changed the setting from my usual 180 to 256 and the usage went up to 52%).

Just tested also with a maximum of 350 and that worked too, in fact my test drive midi program only reached 326; memory used went up to 53%.

My processor is 2.8 GHz; don't think that's such an issue,though.

[Bruce A. Richardson]

Hey John,

Yes, depending upon your processor, you can get pretty ridiculous polyphony with G3, and use just about every bit of it with a feisty piano romp!!

You will like GigaPulse very much, too. And I just received the G3 version of Black Grand, and it is nice, nice, nice. Right up your alley.

[JohnGrant]

Thanks guys. That settles it. I'll be picking up GS3.

JG