Toontrack EZkeys Studio Grand

Useful composing tool

I needed some way to make me sound like a better keyboard player than I am, and EZkeys does that well. Also being able to select different performance presets in various styles/genres using my chords is a great tool for new composing ideas. The grand piano sound itself is good but not great. Also there are no built in sound shaping capabilities.

Makes a Freddie out of even the most ham-fisted pianist...

This is a fantastic piece of software. Very easy to use. Occasionally one can end up with some odd chord extensions and inversions but I have absolutely no doubt this was because I didn't even RTFM, I just jumped straight in- it's that intuitive.

For song-writing or creating custom backing tracks it's a no-brainer. My only complaint is that I'm now not working as hard as I should be to improve my keyboard skills- I want to but I don't have to!

Nice Grand Piano Plugin

This is a really good plugin for keys. Of course it does have some issues and isn't as usuable as EZDrummer. It is good to help you build up backing tracks of songs quickly and give you some ideas. I would reccomend playing in your own ideas and editing them rather than using what are essentially loops. All in all a very good plugin. I would consider looking at other versions of ez keys to make sure you pick the most approriate sound/sounds for your style of music and what you want to create/ get out of ez keys. Occationally this plugin will make some strange noises when you have lots going on but this can be sorted by adjusting the buffer size in logic.