Tatak – Toy Piano
Toy piano from a charity shop in Portadown sampled with two Line Audio cm3s.
ByChristopher Scullion
The story
I found this half broken toy piano in a charity shop in Portadown.
I am from Northern Ireland but have lived in Brazil since 2011. Every time I go home I love to go through the charity shops and try to find anything that makes sound. I got this toy piano but unfortunately it wouldn’t fit in our already stuffed suitcases to bring back to Brazil. I sat in the living room one night after everybody slept and sampled the wee thing before catching our flight.
I miced it with 2 Line Audio cm3s. One at the front which picked up a lot of mechanical noise and the other at the back.
Reviews
Unique toy piano
I was getting a little stuck on what to say for these toy pianos. The last few ones i reviewed all sounded extremely similar. This one really impressed me. This has a more full range sound, theres alot more mids in this one that i really like. It makes it warmer and rounder. Also, while most toy pianos have those characteristic squeaks and mechanical noises, the noises going on in this one are unique and really characterful. Something about them is different. The dynamics and round robins are also pretty great here. I think this is the best toy piano on pianobook
Creepy little piano!
It's really a small, broken beaten toy piano, that is also really dynamic as well! There is also a weird thing about the range of the instrument. I don't know what lead to that decision, but its range is set far low, to the point that you need to go an octave down in the settings of an 88 key, and it's not because it goes too deep in pitch. This obstructs the playability by a lot in my opinion. The samples contain a little white noise but that shouldn't be the problem considering the broken nature of the instrument in general.
Creepy little piano
I don't usually find toy pianos creepy, but this one kind of is. This piano has a lot of character and is well recorded. There are two things which make this piano less playable than it oculi be. First, all of the notes seem to be two octaves lower on the keyboard than you'd expect them to be. Second, the editing at the start of the waveforms is pretty loose in general. This results in a fair amount of timing slop when you try to play, and makes it tough to play in time. However, I liked this piano enough that I felt it was worth investing the time to trim all of the samples up tighter and shift all of the samples up two octaves in the mapping editor as I think I'll probably use this sound in the future. Overall, a nice and characterful toy piano!