In the corner of practice room 3 in my sixth form’s music building, there is a small grand piano that remains mostly unused and untouched by students using the space.

The room has become the school band’s main practice room and the piano has become, well, a table. Saddened by this, and many thanks to my recent discovery of the wonderful world of sampling and decent sampler, I decided that I wanted to immortalize this piano for my personal use and the use of others. I am incredibly excited by this sampled piano as although it may not be of the highest audio quality it is my first sample instrument and I am incredibly proud of it. Although I made use of noise reduction plugins there is some noise in the background at points that is noticeable on higher volumes due to the hustle and bustle of the music department and a nearby road and airport; though I could have probably reduced this noise further I believe that it blends well with the slightly out-of-tune and abandoned piano in an almost poetic way and it creates an almost solemn reminiscent feeling that I enjoy and that will remind me of the particular piano once I leave my sixth form to go on study leave and then onwards to university thus leaving my sixth form, the music department, and the piano that only I seem to play behind forever.

There are 2 presets in the decent sampler library; true pedal and normal. True pedal is actual samples from the piano with the sustain pedal down however that made the top few octaves of the piano even more out of tune than the rest of it so I made the normal version which doesn’t use dedicated pedal samples but instead uses DecentSamplers built in sustain pedal function on the default samples of the piano! I believe the true pedal version has a more lovely sound however the out of tune top end can make it difficult to work with.

The piano was recorded using two Rode M3 condenser mics going into an Allen & Heath Zedi10. The instrument has 3 velocity layers and two round robins. The true pedal version has a further set of samples that will be activated when the sustain pedal is pressed, this also has 3 velocity layers. there are a few notes that do not have three velocity layers due to the fact that certain velocities on notes would cause the piano to go more out of tune so I instead stretched out other layers so that they had a similar velocity pattern to other notes giving them a sound that blends with the rest of the instrument.

Contributors

thawney

Responsible for UI Design, Recording, Audio Processing & Programming