Demo A is the first of many demos coming to pianocompare.com.  This is simply an arrangement of the "Oh How I Love Jesus" Hymn written by Fredrick WhitField in 1855.  This arrangement does have a middle improvisation section to allow for some dynamics to be placed around the piano in this demo only.  Also at the end there are some substained notes to allow the listener the advantage of hearing the sample decay.  I am not a great pianist but the pieces are not about performance as much as sample quality and to give users an idea of some of the great piano samples available. 

Demo A - Oh How I Love Jesus using Ivory with preset (patch) Concert D Recital.  This is a Steinway Sample listen to the beautiful rendering of this timeless hymn

We get many emails asking about the process of how we record the demos.  So with this demo we are going to a very high level explaination of some of the steps that are used to capture the demo.  Below are the basics:

The recording is done on an Intel based PC using Sonar 7 Producer Edition.  You may use different sequencers and recording software tha will render the same results.  Below is a screenshot of the Sonar track after it has been recorded:

The Piano in this Demo is Synthogy's Ivory and the patch is called Concert D recital. This is a Steinway sample set and all the defualt settings for the patch were used but you may notice that the voices are changed to 40 to allow additional polophony for some of the arpegio parts in the center of the demo.  Here is a screen shot of the Ivory VST from that was placed in the Sonar Synth Rack:

The next step is simply to bounce or mixdown the midi to an audio track as seen here.  Now we have an audio track that will represent our demo.  For best clarity we never use the fast-bounce feature. 

Next Step is make sure the levels are good and and get it into a MP3 format.  The MP3 format is needed because at this time the audio is in a wav format that would take too long to download or stream because of file size..  We could simply export to MP3 but the process we choose is to highlight the thrid track above and under the tools menu select Sound Forge.

Sound Forge 9 is tool from Sony (prior developed by Sonic Foundy) that allow for extensive audio editing and processing.  It does not come with Sonar but is a separate tool purchase.  In this process we are going to nudge the volume up slightly (not normalize it) and then save it to an MP3 format.  We could do this in Sonar but since we have this tool we will take advanage of it.

Here is a screenshot after using the Volume Process to nudge the volume up 4.58db overall.

 The wave file then is simply saved to Mp3 format at 192K at bit depth of 16;

Other details of this recording process that may be of interest is that the controller used to play the Ivory VST was a Kurzweil PC2 88 weight key controller. All the recording process stayed in the digital format throughout the process no receptor was used and also the VST is located on the same PC as the Sonar in which it was recorded.

As requested by many users here is Midi File for this demo 'Oh How I love Jesus'.