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I'm not crazy about any of the stock piano programs; they all have too much reverb and harshness for my taste. I have found that the Alesis pianos are very good for cutting through a rock mix, but the sound and response is not great for classical piano and solo work. Fortunately, the underlying samples are very good, and the QS is a clean sounding synth with very respectable power, so if you can describe exactly what you want the QS can usually do a decent job of producing the sound. With a few hundred parameters to set, however, making a great sound takes a bit of time and a lot of careful listening. With my improved piano patches, I find my QS8 to be a very satisfying piano for classical music. I hope you will enjoy them as well.
Here is my bank of good piano patches and a few other interesting odds and ends.
Download the bank "sams_24" containing Alesis QS8 clean piano patches:
In Unisyn (.ubk) format for the PC. (approximately 69K bytes)
In sysex (.syx) format. (approximately 79K bytes)
(Latest patch revision numbers: Pianisimo28, MonoPiano9, Pianforte5, about 75 other patches.)
Make sure to back up your user bank before you start playing with these banks. I think the best way to use these patches is from Unisyn; this program is a bit complicated but if you're serious about programming the QS it is definitely worth learning. If you are a beginner the easiest way to try this bank is to load the sysex verion into the Freeloader application (it's on the Alesis CD) and "play" the file. But remember, this will overwrite your userbank. You can get the factory bank back from the CD-ROM.
Here is one good piano (Pianisimo24) in SYSEX format, though I haven't tested this.
cheers,
sam
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