The story
I’ll keep this one short and sweet
Today I was chatting with a fellow pianobook member on instagram and about an hour later a friend asked me to teach them how to sample their instrument / make a sample instrument.
So here’s this, the result of my nostalgia and instruction — not perfect by any means, but I quite like it. It’s a blue toy piano sampled 2 round robins each occupying every other note on the piano, alternating (Each robin is the opposite whole tone scale), at a few velocity layers per note. I waited a little time after each key press as to capture a release sample for each note recorded.
This let us adequately sample each key on the instrument once while retaining some playability and uniqueness to each keypress.
The recording chain was just a pair of AKG P170 into a MOTU 828x (stock pres).
I’ve included an EXS as well as a Kontakt version, if I had to pick between the two the Kontakt one is a little more optimized / has knobs to balance the volume between note vs. release.
I hope all can get some joy from this, I certainly did!
Reviews for Blue Toy Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Toy piano, not much else...
It's a well-sampled little toy piano, but you won't find much more than that. I would have loved to see some built-in processing to perhaps distort or synthesize the sound if the user wanted to just to add some variety. For what it is, it's very well done. Good job.
Really Organic Crunchy Sound
While I agree that there are programming inconsistencies here dynamics, noise, etc, I acctually think this is a really neat little instrument. I think despite these issues it still sounds really realistic and organic because of how kind of broken it sounds. Maybe these inconsistencies even help with this broken quality. The sound is really kind of rusty and crunchy with alot of mechanical noise and natural artifacts. I honestly think this is really useful for a specific vibe and i dont think these issues impede its usefulness in any way. The instrument sounds broken and rusty so if you choose to use it, thats the sound you're getting anyway. You're not excepting to be able to play a beautiful and even performance on this instrument. It definitely has its use. A whole lot of character
Nice, old toy piano
Very nice!!! I remember I had something like this when I was a child. Some broken, yet warm sound of toy piano. Nicely captured! Higher range has some strong layer and I think this makes a little difficult to play, so probably if dynamics was lowered down it would be nicer to play with!
A well-sampled toy piano
It's just an alright toy piano, with the good attribute that it has a little to no audible white noise in the samples. Some notes are off pitch, some low velocities don't register so you only get a click sound, but what you need to know is that other than the mid register, the others are unusuable since they sound way too stretched, especially the low one. Honestly I've found some much better made toy piano libraries here, but honestly you might like the sound if this one more than the others.
An ambitious little toy
So, being a toy piano, of course it isn't going to scale particularly well to the extremities of its register, but I commend the creators for extending the range across the full 88 keys. Above C6 and below C2, the instrument starts to get a little wacky, I can see how below C2 can be used in a music context, but everything above C6 should be avoided in my opinion. Other than that, it's a solid toy piano sound, and should be used as such. In my testing, I was playing it too much like an actual piano, and that didn't translate over at all, so it needs to be approach as the instrument it is.
