Hi,

I’m Pierre Caillet, a French film music composer. During the Covid-19 pandemic in France we are all confined. All productions are stopped, recording studios and mixing facilities are closed. To be with my family, I’ve stopped to go daily In my own studio and days are long…

To do something, I’ve started to sample some instruments laying around at home. At first, I’ve managed to do a great Hand Pan for Kontakt and shared it with composers friends. Then, my friend Yan Volsy (also a French film composer) proposed me to record his Mustel Celesta to do a Kontakt program for Pianobook. He took the time to make a great record of this wonderful instrument, I then edited it and convert it into this Kontakt virtual instrument : “Confinement Céleste”

This is an original 4 octave Mustel Celesta, probably from the early 1900’s. Yan got it at a RadioFrance auction. It is old, rather abused, noisy, and its pitch is a bit high (the tuning was properly globally lowered in the Kontakt Instrument)

Recorded @ 48khz 24 bit with two pair of close microphones :
– Ribbon : Prodipe RSL (Blumlein stereo Ribbon microphone)
– Cardioid : Spaced pair with Aston Origin (left) and Lewit LCT540 (right)
All samples were denoised using Isotope RX

More or less chromatically sampled with 4 levels of velocity, key release noise and sustain pedal noise.

This Kontakt instrument gives control level for each pair of microphones.
An independent volume for key release noise and sustain pedal noise is also present.
No reverb as I prefer to use my own reverb in a mix, but Pianobook’s logo is included in the about page !

I’m not a Kontakt script programmer at all, so I was unable to keep note release noises when sustain pedal is on.
Anyone is welcome to correct this and let me know how to do it properly.

Should works with Kontakt Full 5.8.1 and up.

The “ConfinementCelesteV1.0_Kontakt” folder contains everything you need to use it with Kontakt (samples are lossless compressed by Kontakt)
The “ConfinementCelesteSamples” folder contain all the samples uncompressed as a Pianobook requirement, but this folder isn’t required for the Kontakt instrument.

No Soundcloud demo yet, I have to go back to my studio to get a proper 88 notes keyboard.
I hope I will be there soon !

Thanks for your great work with Pianobook and Spitfire. Also a special thanks to Christian for his great music and all those great videos.

Cheers

Pierre Caillet, confined composer