Maine Upright
A dilapidated upright immortalized in sample form
ByPyamPendleton
The story
A dilapidated upright that has been in my family for decades, this Winter piano was recorded in a garage in Maine with a single AT2020. This recreation is not only my first attempt at a Kontakt instrument, but also an immortalization of the piano with which I began my musical journey.
The interface features four knobs to control the volume of two pre-rendered reverbs, a dry mix, and key release noises. The larger central knob controls samples mangled with a custom pedalboard setup to create a rich pad.
I hope this brings as much joy to those who download it as it did for me to create it!
Reviews
So close, yet so distant
What a lovely instrument. It's soft and intimate, but cold in a way. Then there's the pedalboard knob, which just takes it creatively to a whole other place that is distant and rough, but in a good way. Blended together they form a very inspiring instrument that sounds phenomenal. Really fantastic work and thank you for releasing it for free.
What phenominal range this has!
Ok, if you wanted piano that gives you plenty of options in terms of sound, this is your way to go. Both reverbs sound very clean, the pedalboard adds a very lush background tone that blends in extremely well, the Key Noise knob didn't really work for me, I couldn't hear any difference when messing around with it, but aside from that, I'm a big fan of this instrument. It's not a completely clean recording, so it does have some small piano mechanical sounds, but they definitely add to the character rather than draw attention to themselves. A key note I should make though, the instrument does favour longer notes, short notes cut off a little strangely, I like it, but it might be a deterrent for some. The routing as well was a little off, it was set for the maker's original computer as opposed to locating on any computer it's download on, but that was an easy fix by finding the folder I grabbed the .nki file from.
Beautiful tone but a little too staccato.
The tone and recording of this piano i think is really great. It has like a jazzy night club vibe. Very natural and warm. The Piano noises are nice and controllable which is awesome. However i feel like the sustain of the samples is a little short, leading to a staccato type of feeling. Reverb helps alot with this but sometimes you dont want a really reverb sound. I think if this instrument was denoised a bit and if the sustain of the samples was a bit longer, or held onto the sustain longer it could be really great