5 Best Piano VST Plugins for Incredibly Realistic Sound (Dec 2023 Review)

Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2 Review

It almost feels hard to start describing Omnisphere 2. It’s got so many excellent qualities that so many professional musicians can’t live without it. Yet it’s still user-friendly enough for beginners. It’s an incredible package and it’s the best piano VST package on the market.

With over 12,000 different sounds in its vast library and endless possibilities to create your own, I could easily spend hours browsing the collection. It’s a good exercise in self-control!

The included sounds are very high-quality and are organic and just feel right when you hear them.

There are lots of different pianos and keyboards. One of my personal favorites is ‘plucked dream piano’.

The program also features a super arpeggiator and many other effects that you can use to take your music to the next level. These tools are awesome as they allow you to really customize your music, and they can quite easily make it seem more advanced than it really is.

Even though chances are that you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for in the huge library, you can also create your own samples. You can even make up purely synthetic sounds from scratch.

This software is great no matter which level you are currently at. You can use the easy interface to get things done quickly or go deep into custom modulation if you fancy that.

I really like that, because it means that you can learn with the plugin, you will be able to use it as a beginner and are able to grow with it as you progress.

This means that you won’t have to upgrade to something more advanced after a while.

It’s really nicely designed and very user-friendly. You can tell that the developers have thought about almost every single detail. Simply put, it’s the best piano VST ever made and it’s something every music producer, composer and pianist should own!

Garritan Abbey Road Studios CFX Concert Grand Review

If you are looking for a pure piano VST plugin with what might be the best sampling ever, then you’re going to love Garritan’s grand piano.

This is one of my absolute favorites because the quality is so remarkably high. It’s the best piano VST if you demand the most authentic replication of a concert grand.

Imagine the scenario: Yamaha’s flagship CFX concert grand piano is placed in Abbey Road Studio’s Studio One. With some of the finest sound engineers in the entire world taking full advantage of the best microphones in existence.

They play every single key multiple times and record all the different ways you can imagine playing them.

As you probably can guess, the result is the best piano VST plugin that sounds impossibly like a real piano. And not just any piano, but arguably the finest grand piano ever.

You can decide within the piano plugin if you want the lid to be open, closed, or half open. You can also add reverb, change the sustain and so on.

Do you want it to seem like you’re in a church or some other place with cool acoustics? No problem!

You can also switch between what the player hears and what the audience hears. Another thing that I find useful is that you can change how far the microphone is from the piano.

It might seem like it’s a one trick pony to buy a VST plugin that only has a piano, but I feel like it’s such a good one that it’s definitely worth the cost. It’s the best piano VST ever made to replicate the authentic sounds of a concert grand.

You can really alter the tone to get it exactly like you want it, as long as you want a piano that sounds unbelievably authentic.

Synthogy Ivory II Italian Grand Virtual Instrument Review

I wish I had a 10 foot Italian grand piano in my living room, but my husband says that we don’t have room for both a sofa and a grand piano.

If you too have a spouse that prefers comfortable furniture over pianos that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, you might like me need Synthogy Ivory II Italian Grand.

This piano plugin brings one of the best grand pianos in the world directly into your DAW and allows you to create beautiful music. It’s another top choice if you’re looking for the best piano VST on the market.

What I like the most about this piano plugin is how real it sounds, people often can’t tell whether it’s a VST or an actual piano they are hearing. That is exactly the effect many of us are going for.

There are quite a few things you can do as well to change the tone. You can decide how much the lid should be open, how much key noise should be heard and your preferred dynamic range.

This piano VST is great, because many of these things are things that a pianist considers if possible, and it adds to its credibility.

There are a few other settings you can change and effects to add on, like choosing which from a wide selection of rooms the piano is played in.

There are also standard things like reverb, delay, wet/dry and so on that you can play around with to really get a unique sound that is exactly what you want.

This is another excellent piano VST that makes for the best piano plugin if you want some of the finest concert piano sounds at your fingertips.

Spectrasonics Keyscape Virtual Keyboard Collection Review

When people that are passionate about something come together and work for ten years to create something perfect, the result is bound to be something extraordinary!

This is definitely the case when it comes to Keyscape. This piano VST plugin is a collection of different vintage keyboards.

It took ten years to find the right keyboards, restore them and sample them and I am a big fan of how it turned out! This wonderful package contains some of the best piano plugins in existence.

Part of the charm is that the samples aren’t perfect. It might sound like a contradiction, but the thing is that old keyboards do have a few quirks and noises that are just part of the experience.

While others might have aimed to eliminate these, the team behind Keyscape decided to embrace them!

Many of the keyboards in Keyscape are really rare, and for that reason, it really feels like a treat to use it. There is no way I could ever get one of them for real, and that is probably the case for you too. This package contains highly expressive sounds and some of the best virtual piano instruments I have encountered.

XLN Addictive Keys Studio Collection Review

Addictive Keys is the most user-friendly piano VST plugin I’ve reviewed. It’s quite similar to Garage Band in the way that it’s very visual and easy to understand.

When you choose between all the cool sounds, it’s easy to preview the different ones by clicking on them before you confirm your choice. This makes it easy to browse through many different instruments quickly.

Addictive Keys are made from samples from grand- and upright pianos. There are not only classical pianos but other, more modern alternatives as well. One of my favorites is called ‘Death Row’, which is a heavily distorted version of the grand piano.

You can also experiment with filters, distortion, reverb, phaser, delay, tremolo, pitch and a lot more very easily.

It really feels like they’ve had beginners in mind when they created this excellent piano VST. I would absolutely recommend it as your first piano VST plugin if you still feel like you have a lot to learn.

Another thing I personally enjoy about this virtual piano VST is that there is a built-in memo recorder. It’s really handy when you’re composing and need to remember something.

When you use Addictive Keys you have access to MyCloud, which is an online service that synchronizes your presets and memos.

MyCloud allows you to produce music both from your home computer and at work. It’s also great if you’re collaborating with other people on projects.