• Free Reason Refills Trap

I have both and enjoy both. I think the refill sounds better, but sometimes you'll here more 'trailing white noise' if you're playing a lot of notes and sustaining for a while. And while Radical Piano isn't quite as authentic sounding, it's still pretty damn good and you can really fine tune the settings.

Free Reason Refills Trap

As someone else suggested, trial Radical Piano first and if you like it, maybe just go with the cheaper option. Keep in mind you can get the Radical Bundle also, which includes Radical Keys.My personal biggest gripe with the Radical REs is I didn't LOVE any of the presets. I found I had to adjust them to my liking.

But it doesn't take long to do that and save some nice presets. Do you have a midi keyboard, or do you just enter the notes manually?I've found that sometimes trying to make something sound realistic can just bring much more attention to how far from realistic it actually sounds. To get around this, take an alternative approach, take two pianos and combine them, or maybe get two similar sounding pianos and pan one left, one right. Add some multi band compression for parallel compression, just go light on it; etc. You'll be able to get a very unique and expressive sound, and it'll sound good enough to put into a production, and not as if you were attempting and failed to get a realistic sounding piano. As a fellow pianist using Reason I have also been looking into how to get nice piano sounds. I have both the Reason piano refill, and also the Radical Pianos rack extension.

IMO you would be better off getting the rack extension. To give you an overview:The refill has sampled the following pianos:- Steinway D- Steinway K- Yamaha C7Radical Pianos samples the following:- Home Grand A Bechstein grand piano- Steinway Model D grand piano- Futura upright pianoI am pretty certain the same microphone placement was used for making the sample sets for both these products (see the Radical manual for a better overview of this ).Regarding the quality of the samples they are on a similar if not the same level. The biggest dislike I have is that depending on the note velocity you play it seems to be quantised to one of four different amplitude levels (maybe there are five levels in radical pianos, not entirely sure, but its not that much of an improvement if any on the refill).

Of course this is a compromise given that to have more samples would cost a lot more memory etc. In the end if you want a real piano sound, you should just record with a real piano.Having said that the actual sounds themselves are not bad at all. Both come with various presets and different styles.The reason I would recommend Radical Piano is two-fold:.Given the nice visual interface you can easily tweak the piano parameter settings to create custom piano sounds.