Unipiano Swarm
This piano is collecting dust in the big dining hall of my university and that was the first thing I saw when walking in for the first day. I decided to give sampling it a go, as it is one of my favorite hobbies. (And its part of my neverending quest to get to do […]
ByHeikki Ketola
The story
This piano is collecting dust in the big dining hall of my university and that was the first thing I saw when walking in for the
first day. I decided to give sampling it a go, as it is one of my favorite hobbies. (And its part of my neverending quest to get to
do this professionally someday). So I managed to sneak in the lobby in the middle of the night and started hitting the keys (I think I scared
some people sitting in the nearby library)
The whole front of the piano is open, giving some opportunities for more interesting recordings.
I sampled the main piano with 3 velocity layers and 2 mic positions (stereo/mono) so you can switch between a small cool difference
in the positions. Next I recorded the same with pedals (without velocities this time) and a special patch that I call “String”.
I used a pen to hit the strings through the open piano front to create a rather creepy sound.
The last and the best part is the piano swarm. This patch contains the whole piano range. I played with my recording buddy all of the respective
piano keys on a random order to create this swarmy spitfire sound. The patch is slow and doesn’t loop so perfectly, but its fun to tinker around
with some delay effects.
Reviews
A lovely piano sound, with some extras!
I think this one is Heikki's best sampled instrument so far! The piano sounds absolutely lovely with minimal noise and nice dynamics overall. The swarm patch is a very nice addition. It's small, but it's pretty much each pitch shifting through its octaves. Nice! I continue not to like the GUI aesthetics though, especially this black Reverb label on such a background.
Poor man's noir?
The best part of this library is the Swarm preset. It will give you some scandi-inspired octave transpositions of whatever you play. I wish it was available in more octaves than just one, but it's still cool and useful. There are some issues in the 'pedal' preset: The zone that runs from C2 to F#1 has the wrong root key assigned, so it plays transposed. The dynamics and timbre aren't very even from one to zone, so you will experience some timbral shifts as you go from register to register. I hope we get to hear some more swarming instruments from Heikki in the future!
Some interesting potential
Overall, this piano sounds great. I think the recording is well done and imitating the 'swarm' style instruments is a great angle to take. Even though you have 3 velocity layers, it seems like something might be off with the blending between them. The pedal preset actually sounds pretty cool to me, a nice and muted with a bit of tuning twang. The Swarm preset was really neat and well put together. With some small changes I think this could be a fantastic instrument. Maybe even lean into the spacial delay/reverb and even distortion on the piano.