The story
I’m a Glasgow based producer/composer called Richard Luke and was scoring a short animated film using this great Steinway Model D Concert Grand, located in a nearby church in Glasgow. I decided to have a crack at sampling it which is my first foray into piano sampling (thanks pianobook) It’s delicate and glassy and you can really sense the acoustic of the space it was recorded in.
Reviews for Church Steinway
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A solid sweet piano
This is a sweet little piano that can win many hearts. I love the soothing character it has while not being a felt piano. It is also dynamic and very responsive. If you push it too much you might start getting some white noise, so in that regard it can surely be improved. I find the default release way too short, but luckily it was easily adjustable via the correlated knob. It's also always a welcome addition to have release triggers separated and fully controllable. Nice! If you are using SFZ, you will need to either download the EXS or the DecentSampler package, since that's where the samples are.
Underappreciated; Beautiful
Okay, it's simple.
Fine, there's no GUI.
And yet I still consider this to be one of the most usable pianos on Pianobook.It's full of character and the room ambience in the samples is just right.
I don't think I'd ever use this as a solo-piece instrument, but when you only need a piano that sits well among other instruments, this always--and I mean always--works.Warm and Characterful
Despite mostly being a fan of warm felt pianos im actually a big fan of the sound of this one also. Its warm and characterful which i often dont feel about non felt pianos. It is a bit noisy but there are many worse offenders on pianobook. The biggest issue it seems is inconsistency in dynamics. I find that its not as playable as it could be sometimes a really loud note pops up out of nowhere which is pretty jarring. Theres probably a way to go into the back end of the sampler and fix this but i dont know how to do that. I would love to see an updated version of this because the tone and recording is really nice
Really lovely piano sound, but with a few issues
This piano sound is truly lovely, but there are some things holding it back. There is a bit of noise in some of the samples, though not really an amount that would make it particularly noticeable or unplayable. The recording is really pretty good due to having a great instrument, and good mics that are well positioned. The sample that spans D4 to G4 is unfortunately somewhat out of tune with itself, but it's not too bad. The notes are generally pretty even dynamically from sample to sample, but there are a few zones where there's a somewhat pronounced difference between adjacent zones. The single biggest issue with this library, in my humble opinion, is the difference between the forte dynamic layer and the softer dynamic layer. It's just too large a jump. This reduces playability because I found myself staying -- or trying to stay -- within the soft layer, only to have a couple of notes accidentally slip into the louder layer, so they sounded like weird accents in my playing. This could potentially be corrected by reducing the volume of the louder layer. It would probably blend a lot better with the softer layer like that. Even so, this is a really lovely piano. So, if you have MIDI plug ins that allow you to limit the range to velocities which get to this library, it could potentially be really lovely and really usable.
It's ok
It's nice enough but doesn't have great character but it's very playable and a good effort.
