The story
I sampled this piano super later one night at my university to help me underscore a cartoon. Each note is sneaky-staccato with a unique preparation.
Preparations ranged from simple stuff like blu tack under the hammers, to muting strings with my hand. The idea is each note is different and a little surprising!
Mix tip: Try degrading the sound with Izotope Vinyl or Klevgränd’s FreeAmp, before sending the signal into a medium room reverb…
Special thanks to Simon Dalzell from ivyaudio.com, who was kind enough to advice me throughout the process of writing the KSP script!
Reviews for The Sneaky Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Very fun and really different
This is such a nice pokey bright prepared piano library that can be realy useful in a melodic context, especially when layering with other things. It's unpredictable and that's exactly why you should want it
Simple but really well executed
An obviously wonderfully recorded piano with the added pleasure of being a strikingly unique sampled instrument. This is treated piano with real personality plus close and far mic positions. Love it!
Sneaky
Are you prepared for this prepared piano to sneak up on you? This brilliantly simple and surprising library has a rich sound, a simple GUI and a bucket load of character. Of course, where the piano has been prepared some of the notes stick out more than others and the overall velocity control could be a bit smoother. But in reality that may actually take away from the quirkiness and sneakiness of this piano. Great stuff!
Unique and very different but not very dynamic
This piano is truly different from pretty much everything else on the PB website. It's a little different on every key, which under normal circumstances would make for a very poor piano indeed, but in this case, it just adds to the fun. Speaking of fun, I may or may not have put off doing the work I was actually supposed to be doing today after putting an arpeggiator on the same track as this library and jamming out. I admit to nothing. There is one big drawback to this library, and that is that it's not very responsive to dynamics. I'm not sure, but I don't think it responds to velocity. This is an easy enough edit in Kontakt, of course, but it kind of feels like a big oversight when everything else in this library is so fun! Speaking of so fun, I do like the film noir private eye who controls the reverb. He does indeed seem stealthy!
Fun but very limited
This is a very nice idea that is basically a piano that features a kind of wonky staccato playstyle no matter what you do. Some notes are off, some are muted, some are dead, some are misplaced. I was expecting to have a lower velocity feature which you can really create a piano to forte feeling, but unfortunately you are stuck with one somewhere in the middle. Keep in mind that the samples have quite a white noise in them. I got to say, I loved the reverb control idea in the GUI. It really got me some seconds to figure it out!
