Unlike my other piano library, this one only has two patches. One has panning to imitate a player’s hearing of the piano, the other one does not, but comes default with a small amount of chorus – completely optional, of course.
Now the story for this one is a bit more complicated and I honestly do not remember all of it; and although I could probably ask someone to confirm the details, something about this library’s name tells me I shouldn’t…
So then, what is it? A piano, only named “Albert Schmölz”. Despite having the most german (germanic?) name ever, it’s apparently a national manufacturer (from Brazil). After some bit of research, I found out that it’s a pretty underground manufacturer, popping up as fast as it went away, along with oh so many other piano manufacturers in the early 1900s. The only other information I could find is that, apparently, someone played a Chopin tune in one of these bad boys in the northeast region of Brazil, in 1938. That is the only date I could find, so for now no exact information regarding how old is it, but it is very possibly 100 years old. Kinda baffling, come to think of it.
As to why I’m calling the library “Unknown Home”, well… it is now in my mother’s house, but that exact piano has been in the family for (at least) one or two generations. This same mother (I haven’t exchanged her for another one, believe it or not) and her sister used to take piano classes on that same piano when she was little. How very 1960’s idea of ladylike of her. It then was passed down to my uncle, then to his daughter, and then it has come ‘home’, back to my mother. I could ask her for more information, but I’ll leave it to everyone’s imagination for now – maybe they bought it then, maybe they had it before, who knows?
Small detour, but my mother always talked about how she and her sister had to share clothes and shoes, how they didn’t have a front door in their house for a while… but they had a piano? Really? That’s their priority? It seems they were very applied in their music studies back then. But somehow until last year my mother did not know of the existence of different scales? She told me she thought there was only one scale, and anything else was ‘eastern’ – and she plays the piano way better than I do; but I guess our educations had different priorities – I got to study music because I wanted to compose, she got to study music to play for guests and whatnot.
Anyways, that’s where the library got its name from. I’m pretty sure I recorded the samples using my phone’s microphone, just like the other ones, thus making it slightly lo-fi. I have a proper microphone now, so I plan to actually sample it properly one day, see if I can make a library people will enjoy because it sounds good, and not because it’s lo-fi or ‘interesting’. Two patches, already talked about that. The video is just a small composition to demonstrate – first the normal patch, then the panned one, then both. Actually kind of liked it, will try to turn it into a full song.
So yea, hope someone finds this useful. Happy composing!

~petra

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