 This is augmented grand piano from Arturia. Before we delve into how it makes its wonderful sounds let's just have a quick listen to some of my favorite presets. Starting off with this one land of tone. Now you would have seen some of the knobs moving around in the middle of the interface there and they are changing the sound. Later on we'll discover exactly what they are doing to the sound but first of all let's listen to something a little bit more traditional. This one is called I Felt It. Now I wouldn't want to give you the impression that this is a traditional piano plugin and to prove that let's have a listen to one of these presets which is called Piano Plucks. So the question is how does it go about making this incredible variation of sounds? Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you well. Now I've made it pretty clear in previous videos that I am a big fan of the augmented series from Arturia so I'm so pleased to see that they've now added this augmented grand piano. Now if you agree with me and you also like this instrument don't forget to check the link in the description down below. Now in order to find out a bit more about how the sounds are generated in this wonderful plugin let's first of all start off by talking about layers. If we look at the main interface we can see two pianos on the left an amber piano and on the right a blue piano. These are described as layers A and layers B in this particular plugin and we can use this big morph control in the middle to blend the two okay so all the way over to the left we can hear just layer A and it sounds like this at the moment and all the way to the right we can hear layer B which sounds like this. Now on the morph control can blend them but it's not just a mix control it is actually morphing some of the values under the hood which are generating these sounds. Now to see how these sounds are generated we're going to click on the advance button here. Now we can see layers A on the left here and layers B on the right and we can see that each of them is made up of two different sounds. We have this one here which is a sampled sound twine for layered A and it's also got another sampled sound deep resonance here okay. On the right we can see that layer B is made up of a synth sound cloned Celesta B and also another one which is called picked pluck. Now let's switch off both of the sounds which are making up layer B and also one of the sounds which is making up layer A so we've just got one sound here which is the sampled sound twine for layered A. Now it sounds like this. Now we can swap that out for another sample if we wish we can just click on that and we've got a bunch of samples to choose from here in some different categories so we could do that and we can also control that sound using some of the controls here. So for example we could use the ADSR controls attack decay sustain release to adapt the sound in that way. Give it a very short attack and a long decay. So it's great that we have all of this control over the samples and of course we can play around with that and get that sounding just as we want. Let's switch on the second sample here and have a listen to those two together. Now we also have a filter control at the bottom here I'm not going to go into detail with this but you can imagine that we can change the sound with that as well and you can see that we've also got a filter control on layer B. Let's switch off both of those samples now and go over to layer B and switch on one of the synths here okay. You can see that it's sounding like this or hear that it's sounding like this at the moment and again we do have control over the way this sounds. We can also swap it out for some different types of synthesizer sounds as well by the menus here okay and the same goes again for the second sound with layer B which is synth 2 which currently is a picked pluck that's the two together okay. Now we can switch those on and we can also drag them around so we could have layer A being made up of one sample one synth for example by dragging one of the synths over like so and that swaps it out so now on layer B we also have one sample and one synth so we've got a bit of flexibility there but this is the essence of how we're making sound within this plugin. The next thing I want to look at is modulation so there's several different ways that we can modulate different aspects of our sound. What do I mean by that? Let's have a look at this low frequency oscillator we can see working here. We can see that it's assigned to two attributes sampler one fine which is the tuning control and sampler two fine which is also tuning control for that. Now at the moment it's set to some fairly sort of low values so its extremes are not going to be all that extreme so you won't hear too much in a way of variation in tuning yeah but if we change these to a much more extreme value like so then we can really hear it. Now of course we can go ahead and change different aspects of that oscillator as well to change the sound of that yeah. Now we'll switch those off because they sound horrible. Let's have another look at another way of doing it we can go to the function controls here now the function control at the moment here is assigned to synth position two and filter B cutoff. Let's just go back to our layers and switch off everything except for synth position two you can see the position control here yeah so that's what we're going to be modulating. I'm going to go and pick one of the presets here let's do this one hopefully we can hear this if I put this to a fairly extreme value and you can hear that modulation happening there in time with what you're seeing on the screen there as well. We've also got some random modulation here as well and also this one it's quite interesting the keys one okay this is where different aspects of your keyboard or input input from your keyboard can be assigned to different aspects of the sound. Now velocity is not assigned to anything here at the moment so that's not going to make any difference but after touch is. Now let's just quickly reset our sound so we can actually hear it properly. Now you can see the after touch here is assigned to the vibrato values here okay the depth and rate vibrato values. Now after touch is what happens when you sort of press hard on a keyboard after it's after you actually played it okay not all keyboards have this ability mine does so as I press down harder on the key you can see this kick in and I can add vibrato to the sound. Yeah so you can see and hear that happening there and obviously we've got our modulation wheel etc assigned to different attributes as well so there's lots of different ways that we can actually modulate different aspects of our sound. So another way that we can change our sound is with the arpeggiator at the moment if I play a C major triad chord it sounds like this. Now if I turn on the arpeggiator and I've already set up some settings here and play the same chord again let's have a listen. Now there's a couple of things which are being arpeggiated here first of all the velocity which is on this row here and I've made my adjustments here by just dragging these lines around and the second row is where we can adjust what's called the gate so basically this is the length of the note now you can see through the progression here I've gradually adjusted the lengths of the notes so they'll be longer. Now with this particular preset that sort of brings in that more sort of airy sound as the notes are played a little bit longer so if I play the arpeggio again you can hear that airiness coming in towards the end of the sequence so it's nice that we can sort of adjust those two things. Now you can hear at the moment that as I play this it's starting from the bottom note in the chord and then going up to the top and then going back down to the bottom again we can change that behaviour with the type control down here so if I flick this over it will now start on the top note and go down to the bottom or if I flick this over again and we can see that with this type it'll go from the bottom to the top and then work its way down again and then back up again okay so with this one if I play the same triad it sounds like this I better stop there before I get a copyright strike for a famous song. So as I say we are adjusting both the velocity and the gate here now a nice thing that we can do with both of these control is and is add a random element in there so if I do this for velocity I'll go to the random control here and just drag this up it's like a slider here and as I drag it up you'll see those bars around the main lines sort of move so now as I play my chord we'll get some variation some random variation with the velocity but it'll generally kind of follow the same the rules that I've set for it here with my sequence so we'll have a listen again it's nice that we have that control now at the moment it's just playing single notes with every single step but we can set it up to play the whole chord on particular steps if we want to just by clicking on the chord button here I'll just do it very randomly here I don't know what this is going to sound like we'll do it like so now let's have a listen the lots of fun can be had with this arpeggiated here now let's move on to some effects now this is a kind of a just so you know coverage of the effects section here because I really feel it kind of speaks for itself to be honest with you but just so you know layers A and layers B can have two effects applied to each and you can see that there's various different effects available here and we can change them out for different things and we can control them all here in the way that you would expect to control them okay so many different effects to choose from and also if we go down to this main tab here we do have two main effects here as well delay and reverb and you could see if you went back to the front panel that you could sort of control the level of these effects from the front panel here so as I say just so you know there's quite a lot of effects here now if we look at our front page again as I mentioned a moment ago we can control the level of our effects here with the four bottom controls we can see here but we've also got these four controls the one in the middle and three at the top here so the one in the middle being the morph control we've got the color control we've got the time control and the motion control now these are a little different as I mentioned earlier with the morph it's not just a mixed sort of blending control it's actually morphing attributes now if we go to the advanced section and we make sure we're on the macros tab this is where all of that magic actually happens so if we look at this section here which is the morph control we can see that it's assigned to a number of different attributes here yeah so for example it's assigned to the volume level of layer a part one remember each layer is made up of two parts we've got the volume level for a and b here the same for layers b the volume level for part one and part two here okay now as we move on we can see that this morph control is also assigned to sampler to a tax attribute here yeah and also synth ones density and a few more aspects of the sound here so in fact as we adjust the morph control it's doing much more than just sort of blending the volumes of things now what we can do with each of these attributes is set they set their minimum and maximum values yeah so that's changing the behavior as we move the morph control and also we can sort of set the curve here as well I'm just dragging up and down on this little graphic here and you can see the way the curve is changing there so we get a lot of control over what's happening with each of these sort of individual front panel controls and just as by the way I've been doing a lot of this in the advanced area here but if you quickly want to adjust these values as well as doing it here on this macros tab what's persistent throughout the whole interface are these four controls here right at the bottom yeah color morph time and motion so you don't actually have to keep going back to the front panel here to access those you can also access them from the bottom and this is where a lot of the magic of this particular plugin actually happens now the two other instruments in the augmented series are augmented strings and augmented voices and they are also a part of the V collection from Arturia I've made a video about that and you can watch it right here go on click on that thumbnail