Beware of the Wurlitzers...not ready for prime time.

DunedinDragon

You might want to give the new Wurlitzer plugins (Diamond and Phoenix) some time to cook before you jump in on them. I purchased Diamond early this morning and struggled with getting it 1) paid for, 2) downloaded completely and 3) working normally. Some things are silly things that demonstrate a significant lack of attention to detail, some are just inadequate testing and horrible advice for getting it to work.

But let me say they are beautiful sounding instruments. I toured with a piano exactly like the Phoenix for several years in the 70's and it was a pleasure to play and I loved the sounds I could get from it, and these are great representations of those. That's why I immediately jumped on buying one this morning when they came out. Not a great idea. I went through the normal process of adding it to my cart then trying to pay for it, but they forgot to put up the options for how you want to pay for it so it would go direct to the final download screen and tell you your payment didn't process so you need to go back (ALL the way back) and start over. Did that a few times until evidently someone figured out it was missing and slipped it in so I could pay and start the downloading process.

Let me say I'm on the latest versions of Kontakt, Komplete Kontrol and Native Access so I was expecting everything to go great...however. The download got about 95% complete when all of a sudden it went into a Pause designation and wouldn't complete. So I started scouring the NI support pages and found all sorts of weird recommendations that would literally take and hour or more to completely go through. At that point I just decided I didn't want it that bad and started to pursue getting a refund since technically I hadn't yet received the product I paid for. Talk about crossing into the support abyss. I went ahead and put a claim in with PayPal that I had a problem with the payment and went ahead with getting some things done I needed to finish today.

After a couple of hours I came back and checked and it was still in the paused state so I just figured I'll reboot the PC and try again. Lo and behold Native Access showed up with an Install button enabled on my download so I hit it and it started over but quickly got to the 95% part, finished it up and got it installed.

The good news is I got my piano. The bad news is it should NEVER have been this hard. I never have problems downloading any of my NI instruments but maybe rushing to market has caused some lack of attention in the quality control areas of NI's operations on new products.

Super8boy

Some interesting points about these libraries and the way guitar rig 7 are used in Kontakt but what’s with the 100% pan/modulation on so many of the presets. It’s horrible to listen to, so cycling through presets would be annoying (I wonder can some presets be deleted or rewritten/altered so you don’t have to suffer this full on pan)

Kymeia

So is this just a Rhodes and a Wurli?

DunedinDragon

No. Just two variations of the Wurlitzer.

Super8boy

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/130025#Comment_130025

Sounds more like Rhodes to me. Sparkletop model by Rhodes must be one of them.

Kymeia

Yeah I thought so too - plus they are referred to as 'electric tines' but that description applies more to Rhodes type EPs than Wurlitzer type EPs which use metal reeds for sound production, not tines. It's a bit confusing.

DunedinDragon

These are definitely Wurli's. Having owned and used them daily when touring in the 70's I can easily create the sounds I had back then. Brings back some very fond memories.

As far as tines or reeds I think the terms were used interchangeably back in the day. I just know that they were a LOT easier to replace in the Wurli's than they were in the Rhodes. I learned that through a vast number of times repairing them on the road.