A circle-of-fifths wheel stood in for a keyboardist in 2012

The tool moment

Toontrack brought EZkeys to market in March 2012, extending the sampled-instrument-plus-MIDI-library formula it had already used for drums into a keyboard product. The company's own support forum carries a user request about EZkeys dated 18 March 2012, and an archived capture of Toontrack's product menu from 29 March 2012 already lists “EZkeys Grand Piano,” while a capture from nine days earlier does not, bracketing the release to that month. EZkeys paired a sampled piano with an extensive, pro-played MIDI library and a purpose-built chord engine, aimed at a songwriter who plays little or no keyboard but wants a convincing piano part.

What the documents show

Toontrack's own operation manual describes the MIDI Browser as organized by genre and style, letting a user audition and drag phrases into a Song Track that auto-detects the resulting chord name. It also documents the Chord Selector, built around the circle of fifths, which highlights the six chords most closely related to a song's key and lets a user add extensions, change the bass note, or alter the voicing of any triggered chord. The manual is Toontrack's own reference document for the EZkeys Player across its product line, not a dated press statement; it describes the mechanism, not any specific listening result.

What stays with the musician

The Chord Selector and MIDI Browser narrow the options and speed up auditioning, but EZkeys does not choose which key, chord voicing or MIDI phrase serves a particular song, nor does it decide when a borrowed phrase from the library needs enough alteration to read as an original part rather than a recognizable preset. A songwriter still has to judge whether a smart-transposed phrase actually fits the surrounding arrangement, and whether the manual's random-chord-progression option is a starting sketch or a finished choice.

Judge it by listening

Toontrack's manual documents what the Chord Selector and Browser let a user do; it makes no claim about how musical the resulting progression will sound. A reader can listen for whether a dragged-in MIDI phrase still matches the surrounding parts once smart-transposed to a different key, and whether repeated use of the same library phrase across a session starts to sound like a preset rather than a composed part. This is an editorial listening check, not a documented method from Toontrack.

• Does a phrase pulled from the MIDI library still sound intentional once transposed into the song's key?
• Is the Chord Selector's suggested voicing being used as a sketch, or accepted as the final choice?
• Would a listener familiar with the library recognize the phrase as a preset rather than an original part?

EZkeys' 2012 debut applied a formula Toontrack had already proven with drums, a sampled instrument plus a large, auditionable MIDI library, to the piano chair, with a circle-of-fifths chord engine standing in for the theory knowledge a non-keyboardist might lack.