A sampled piano on a stage: choose the piano, place the microphones, pick the hall, and play. $29.99 (regular $49), launch price until 1 January 2027 · Standalone app, VST3 and AU instrument on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel); standalone app and VST3 instrument on Windows (64-bit)
AHENK is a sampled piano that you place on a stage. Choose the piano, put the microphones where they really stood when it was recorded, pick the hall, and play it from a MIDI keyboard, by clicking the keys on the panel, or with the computer keys in the macOS app. Or let it play: open a MusicXML or MIDI score and the piano on stage plays it through your microphones and your hall. You can write your own notes on the same page and save them as MusicXML or MIDI.
The concert grand on stage with two microphones: the PIANO RACK on the left, the MIC RACK on the right, the hall on top and all 88 keys below.
Choosing a piano, with the settings of the LID ORTF microphone open over the stage: level, room, type and its reverb, delay and echo sends.
The Chamber theatre. The hall selector changes the room and the picture together, and you can change it while you play.
A score open on the SCORE page: the hands and voices as layers, the loop, the tempo and the count-in, with the piano on stage playing it.
Every piano in AHENK comes from real recordings, note by note and at many strengths: a 274 cm concert grand with its lid fully open, a 200 cm studio grand, a felt-damped upright and a short baby grand. Each piano is a separate choice in the installer, so you install only the ones you want. Through the factory setup Stage the pianos are matched in loudness, so switching pianos does not jump in level.
Around the piano stand nine microphone positions, from over the strings to a dummy head in the hall. On each piano one or two of them are the microphones it was recorded with; the others are computed from those recordings, so every position can be heard on every piano. One click sends a microphone to its place and switches it on. Each has its own level, a choice of microphone character, more of the recorded room on the LID and HOUSE stands, and its own reverb, delay and echo.
Recorded is the room each piano was recorded in, nothing added. Recital room, Chamber theatre and Concert hall are measured rooms; Stone church and Live room are built. Every microphone gets the hall according to its distance from the piano, the close ones a little and the house positions more, and the change fades over in about a tenth of a second.
A stage setup is everything on the stage: the microphones, their settings, OUT and the hall, and it can bring a piano. The factory setups run from close and intimate through church, live room and wide pairs to microphone colour, echo and delay, and headphones; SAVE keeps your own. When a setup loads, the knobs glide to their new values while the sound changes at once; double-click returns a knob to the value of the setup that is loaded now.
Open a MusicXML (.musicxml, .xml, .mxl) or MIDI (.mid, .midi) file, or drop it on the panel, and the piano on stage plays it. Loop the piece or whole bars, set the tempo from 50 to 150 %, count in one or two bars, and mute or solo each hand, each voice, the other parts and the pedal.
NEW starts a blank score in any major or minor key. In WRITE the computer keys, the mouse or a MIDI keyboard write the notes: lengths from a sixty-fourth to a double whole, dots, triplets, ties and chords, both hands with up to four voices each, with undo and redo. SAVE AS writes MusicXML, which other notation programs open; MIDI writes a .mid file for your DAW, and the grip beside it drags the score straight onto a track in your DAW.
AHENK is an instrument that answers the sustain, sostenuto and soft pedals of your MIDI keyboard. The DAW project keeps the piano, the stage, every microphone setting, OUT and the hall, and the microphones (under their own names), the hall and OUT are parameters your DAW can automate. AHENK adds no latency. The piano data is stored losslessly compressed (2.44 GB for all four pianos) and read from disk while it plays.
Drag a knob up or down, Shift for finer steps; double-click returns it to the value of the setup that is loaded now. “?” opens help over the panel and never changes the window size.
$49 $29.99 — launch price until 1 January 2027. Updates appear on your Account page; the version you have keeps working forever. After you buy, sign in with your SubverseLab account inside AHENK (it opens your browser); there is no key to type.
Free 30-day trial: the full AHENK for 30 days, starting the first time you open it. After the trial AHENK keeps playing for free: the upright piano with two microphones. One purchase opens it on Mac and Windows.
macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel · Windows, 64-bit · Standalone app, VST3 and AU instrument on macOS; standalone app and VST3 on Windows · One licence, your own computers, personal and commercial use · Paid through Lemon Squeezy in US dollars; refunds: subverselab.com/refunds