With my mum’s passing a year ago, I had her old upright piano moved into my back room. It had hardly been played for over 20 years, so needed a good clean and tune up but, having got it to a reasonable state, I quite liked the sound it gives out. It was built by J. B. Cramer and Co from London and a little research indicates it could be early 20th century but not too sure about that! I’ve sampled it using a pair of Rode NT1A large diaphragm condensers about 12 inches off the strings, through a stereo UA Neve 1073 Unison preamp, with a touch of EQ to manage the bottom end build up, and some tape saturation. I have added Attack, Release, Tone and Reverb knobs. There are four round-robins currently: this is my first crack at sampling a piano, so will look to adding some additional sounds (velocity rounds, pedal noises, etc.) over the next little while.

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Mark Lowrie