The story
This Poole piano belonged to my great grandmother. It is more the a hundred years old.
The 88 notes of this piano were sampled with the sustain pedal down at only one velocity. Some release keys were also sampled. Some t-shirt parts stapled on a long stick were inserted between the hammers and the strings to give that felt sound.
Because of it age, the low strings are dead and the piano is also a little bit untuned. But this is what makes it beauty.
The magics in it sounds appears when you blend the stereo AKG 414 microphones and with the mono Placid Audio Copperphone as an FX microphone. You can blend at your taste between the two microphones where the latest microphone brings that old vibes to this piano sound.
Reviews for Notes Productions Felt Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A nice one.
I do not get some of the reviews here, and the people who write them.
But i get where some of them are coming from, specifically it seems that the cloth was too thin to actually mute the piano enough.Trying out a lot of pianos here, i would say this one is actually pretty good,
contrary to some other reviews here. Especially when you compare it to other pianos in pianobook.
And the sound has some nice character to it.
Definitely into it.Not felt but not terrible
I'm not as down on this as other reviewers are, but it is a little noisy and I'm not sure the FX mic sound is much of an addition. Overall though, the piano sound is classic home upright (not felt) and it plays fairly well.
Doesent sound much like felt
This doesn't sound much like felt to me. Its not really warm and muted but bright and clear. It has a kind of grainy old fashioned quality to it that i think would sound great in an old black and white film. Theres also vert loud noise which is hard to overlook. i dont mind a bit of noise in my pianos but this is really excessive in my opinion. Again i feel like it would work great in an old black and white film because the added noise probably wouldn't be an issue here and the grainy old fashioned quality would really suit it
Weird choices
By default the sound is very wonky, but you can fix that by lowering the FX knob, which is like if the piano was playing through an old radio. Not sure why this even exists, and really unsure why this is the default. The sound is not bad, but it's not great either. If you increase the volume, you will definitely hear some white noise too. I personally dislike the attack, which is too clicky for my taste, but you might like it. There is also a knob where you can set the volume of release triggers, always nice addition.
Graphics tip: the logo should be inversed.
A Rather Average Piano
This piano is generally well recorded. There is some noise in the recording, and a Copperphone was used as an FX mic. I didn't personally care for the sound, and I couldn't come up with a circumstance where that sound would be useful. The choice to sample every key, but only at one dynamic layer is somewhat unusual. As a result, the instrument isn't very responsive dynamically, but there's a lack of continuity of timbre from key to key. I personally would have preferred to see those extra samples being used to capture a wider variety of dynamics since the timbre changes at higher or lower velocities. So, while this is nice, the one unique feature -- the FX mic -- really isn't to my taste, and the dynamic response hurts its playability. While this might be just what some people are looking for, it's not for me.
