Scarbee Classic EP-88s has more samples, greater dynamics and more keys – 88 of them! And everyone who have tried to restore and instrument like this knows that the lowest and highest octaves takes as much time as the rest of the keys together – its a true battle where you need a lot of patience, lots of spare parts and some luck too.
We wanted to have the best possible sustain on each key, perfect balance of tone and as much bark too. There are harder strikes (compared to Scarbee Mark 1) - as well as softer ones.
We spend enourmous amount of time cleaning the samples for noise – each sample went through four rounds, where the last two was done in hand. The reason for this was the fact that we wanted to be able to offer presets with extreme treble EQ settings wihout having extra noise – and without hurting any part of the recordings.
Try to select a Snapshot like 'Bahian Love Affair' – and turn the Instrument Noise totally down on the Settings page – and listen to the difference...
Every musician tries to find his sound - and producers love to be able to get exactly what they are looking for. We made it easy for you: There are 45 different snapshot presets ready for you - and if you want to make your own sounds? get started with the 117 FX presets.
You can even select different routings and have some FX come before or after amp. The possibilities are there for sure. As a tribute to George Duke we created a 3 zone split EQ and a stereo knob so you can carry on what this great man started.
THE PURE JOY OF PLAYING
To make sure you guys will get the best out of SCARBEE CLASSIC EP-88s we made a smart Key Action Calibration utility that will reveal if you actually trigger all velocity zones with your current keyboard.
With our new electric keyboard library we also introduce several new systems that improve the playability and add further realism to virtual instrument keyboards.
Advanced Release Sample System
We simply scanned all sustains from start to end and Nils Liberg and me (Thomas Hansen Skarbye) designed a system so that release the samples will always have the correct sound and energy- no matter the dynamics or the time sustain is held.
Release Sample Resonance System
We created a new way to control the "box" resonance so it would completely mimic reality.
Advanced Sus Pedal Behaviour
It wasn't enough to add pedal FXs of all kinds... we also changed the way the sustain notes affect each other when playing the same key repeatedly.
Note Off Delay
On the MIDI keyboard the release sound started a little to fast compared the the real instrument and repeated notes sounded too staccato like. The solution was to simply delay the note-off sent from the MIDI-keyboard or sequencer so that it would change in same time as the original instrument. It too made a real difference in the playing experience!
A LONG AND BUMPY ROAD
After restoring two instruments completely (my wife Anne was the boss on the "looks") - with one of them with tolex, new metal, logos and I decided that the sounds i could get was not good enough. So I contacted my old friend (and a true lover of this instrument) Dan Stangerup and together with Anne we restored a new one. We ordered so many rare unpopened packages of tines on Ebay that was extremely expensive - just to get the "real" deal.
Everything was adjusted and restored for that perfect sound. But after recording for months in our new studio in Copenhagen I discovered that there was too much electromagnetic noise and also noises from a building site nearby. So with bleeding hearts we had to give up this nice studio (see picture - view from studio) and return to my "country studio".
After a complete rebuild we started new recordings. After a while the team was joined by Jimmy Ostbygaard who struggled for 6 months recording, editing and cleaning samples. My son Oscar helped for a while with the noise reduction tasks and my other son Victor assisted me with the special bass key tunings.
The truth is that we actually rerecorded several times, the same notes over and over again. It was indeed a tough game - and Nils Liberg and I had so many things we wanted to work too so - not an easy job.
But that is a typical SCARBEE product - we go all the way through fire and ice to reach our goal.
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