The story
*Updated 08/03/22 – Fixes: noise reduced all samples – sound of rain and general hiss is reduced slightly tighter attacks and better balancing of velocity layers added release samples added a fake stereo patch
This was the piano that my parents had since the early 1970’s. We got it from a neighbor who was moving and it was quite dark sounding already. Many years later, in 2004, they decided they were going to give it away, so I came out to sample it. It was even more dark then. Unfortunately it was raining that day and you can hear it a bit in the samples.
I didn’t have much of a setup at the time for mobile. I used a single MXL condenser mic, plugged into an apogee MINI-me that went s/pdif into an M-Audio flash recorder! During the process I would move the mic as I went up the piano, hoping to create a pseudo-stereo image by gradually panning the samples. But in the end the mono vibe was quite cool. I had a small CF card- perhaps 1 gig, and this is the result.
Reviews for Everett Upright v2
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Alot of noise but pleasant tone
As the simplest noted, this piano has alot of noise. Im really excited to see he plans on re working this. The tone of the piano is pretty mellow and beautiful. It reminds me a bit of the wurlitzer upright i have in my room. The dynamic response is pretty good although not amazing but i really think the tone of this piano is great and has alot of potential for reworking and deeper sampling. I cant believe this was recorded 17 years ago. Thats pretty cool.
Dark and responsive
This is a very dark sounding piano with a prominent noisy rainy texture in the background that is audible if you play at an above medium rate of force. The more you push it, the more noise you will get, so I guess some noise reduction would be of great benefit. Maybe it would be better for the rainy texture to be on a different layer so it is user configurable. Other than that, it plays well and it has a lovely kind of character.
Pleasant vintage sound with a touch too much hiss
Sounds like a piano that's had a life. You can feel the age through the sound here. Quite a nice warm character but needs a fair amount of eq tweaking to solve the hiss created as notes stack up.
Too much noise
There was unfortunately a washing machine or something running in the background when these samples were recorded. There's a lot of rumble in the 100Hz and lower range, and unfortunately, it extends up to the 300-500 Hz range, so it's not even something you can fix by high pass filtering it. I was able to get a sort of grungy, lo-fi vinyl sound by high passing from 300 Hz. That's the one scenario in which I could possibly see using this as it sounds like playing that was sampled off of a worn and somewhat damaged vinyl record. Beyond that, the background mechanical noise and other other ambient noises in the room of someone moving around sadly makes this instrument unusable for me in its current form. It may be that someone more creative than me will find a great way to utilize it in a creative way, though.
