Our Story

Pianobook is a community of composers, producers, and music makers connected together through a shared love of music creation. Founded by Christian Henson (co-founder of Spitfire Audio) in 2018, the site has now grown to over a 1000 free virtual instruments- offering a huge catalogue of inspirational sounds to get your creative juices flowing! 

Every instrument on the site tells a story- whether it’s a rusty gate that makes an interesting tone, or a centuries old upright that is bursting with character at the end of its life. There is certainly something unique for all musical genres.

In 2022, we introduced our Pianobook Artists series for the Samplists that have offered the best free content on the site. These paid-for projects showcase the best of what they can offer and help directly support their freelance careers within sampling and the music industry at large. 

We also encourage the use of the free sampler plugin- Decent Sampler. Created by the amazing David Hilowitz, this plugin allows all of our users to freely access the majority of the virtual instruments on the site. 

We are really proud of the wonderful community Pianobook has born. If you want to chat to us, join our dedicated Discord Server linked above! 

About this creative community

Pianobook is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers but with the whole community contributing at large by creating and sharing musical demos of the different instruments so users can browse sounds. After launching in 2018 it soon became clear that not everyone was in a position to have an access to a piano so the team decided to open the flood gates too all “instruments” from poorly played flutes to fire extinguishers.

The enthusiastic spirit and invention of a creative community like this courses through every instrument giving you, the music maker, access to one of the rarest collections of music tools. Pristine? Not always. In tune? Well that is definitely optional. But full of life and originality? 100% of the time.

You don’t need to join to use these samples, all we request is that you don’t make commercial sample libraries out of them yourself. Contribute demos via soundcloud, or indeed have a go at making your first sample instrument for all to play and get members on our vibrant forum to help you if you get stuck. Once you’ve made your first instrument you get your own profile page where you can tout what it is you do to the community at large.

To stay in the loop subscribe and follow us on socials twitter, instagram and youtube.

Welcome to pianobook one of the most exciting creative music communities on the internet today!

We’re incredibly thankful to Mihail Mihayylov for creating the Pianobook logo, find out more about him here: https://www.behance.net/miha_ta