The Bjarma Grand
A 1922 Blüthner baby grand piano sampled through a pair of RØDE NT5s.
ByStefingo Unosson
The story
This is a light sampling of a 1922 Blüthner baby grand piano, currently located in my father’s study.
It originally belonged to my maternal great-grandparents, who received it as a wedding gift. One nocturnal sampling session later,
I was left with a small snapshot of this beautiful piano.
Sampled with the pedal down through a pair of RØDE NT5s.
The instrument requires the full version of Kontakt 5.8.1.
Reviews
Warm, tender textured grand
Warm, felt piano sound is my favorite kind of sound. It is very simple but has a tender soft texture of baby grand, it is very nice to add to the selection.
Lush Piano with some issues
I really adore this piano. The sound is just right. It's surprising that it seems to have only one dynamic layer. First let me say that I would absolutely use this instrument as it is since it's really musical. The nit pick list includes some weirdness with the release samples which seem to be unnaturally loud if you hold notes out longer than a few beats, and with the delay at the start of notes due to how the library was edited. Both of these issues can be resolved in Kontakt. I suppose they're both down to personal taste, but judging by the comments of other reviewers, I'm not alone in citing the concern about the sample editing. There's also a mis-assigned sample on A#1 through F0. One of the round robins isn't the right pitch. Still, I like this library enough that I took the time to trim up all of the samples so they'd be more playable, which I guess says something about what I see in this library.
A pristine-sounding piano, with a delay problem
While this piano is absolutely lovely and sampled perfectly with no audible noise and awesome dynamics, there is a teeny-tiny delay when playing it. I had to double-checked it with other similar pianos, including premium libraries and it is in fact a problem of this specific library.