Broken Cassette Piano

The broken cassette piano is a virtual instrument that combines the sound of an upright piano with the lo-fi charm of a broken cassette tape.

Bylyva

The story

The instrument is based on a C. Bechstein piano which I sampled at the dBs Pro studio in Bristol, which has been reprocessed by recording it onto a cassette tape that got exposed to too much moisture and sun over the years. You can mix the clean signal with the one from the cassette to dial in your preferred tone, from a thin, wonky and noisy tape warble of a tone, to a sound which has a bit more body. The combination of the two also leads to a subtle phaser like effect, due to the inconsistencies within the cassette recording creating intermodulation with the dry signal. A shimmer reverb has been added as well for a more dreamlike sound.

This was one of the instruments that I built while doing my masters. When using soft-synths or other virtual instruments I try to incorporate physical, hands-on aspects the sound design, capturing a momentary fleeting thing, rather than something which could be easily replicated. The thing that was especially interesting to me about making this instrument is the fact that each sample and in effect each note captures a different impurity at a different time, unlike for instance when using a reel-to-reel to record an entire arrangement or putting a tape emulation on your instruments bus.

Demo Track using the cassette piano: https://youtu.be/q3p_cE5b8fU

Interface

Reviews

  • great sound mate

    really nice sound, even though at first it crashed DC like 4 times in a row for some reason lol, anyways man i love it

    โ€” blonded100 on 22 December 2023
  • cool sound!

    you pretty much get 2 nice lo-fi sounds in one in this instrument : a dry soft piano then an electro-synth sound rises as you increase the cassette gain knob, pretty nice! cheers!

    โ€” psalmistforever on 26 May 2024
  • I love this sound!

    Still another piano? Not really. This is really usable in many situations, it has some kind of lofi sound but not too much. Thank you for this excellent piano. I will for sure use it here and there.

    โ€” Jaime's Tone on 21 December 2023
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