The story
The Glad Cafe is a cafe/bar/restaurant/arts hub/music venue in the Southside of Glasgow. We opened the place almost 10 years ago now and I like to think that we’re one of the most respected music venues of our size (120 cap) in the country.
The Glad Cafe’s piano was donated to us before we even had a premises by the excellent pianist Ben Sinkie. It was the piano he learnt on; an old Spencer upright school piano from the Murdoch, McKillop & Co. Ltd. shop in Glasgow.
The piano hasn’t been tuned during lockdown but I’ve been enjoying the chance of having a little play on it while our premises have been empty and took the chance to sample it using Pianobook’s MVP template.
Hope you enjoy playing this one.
Reviews for Glad Cafe Lockdown Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A sound rich in history.
A piano full of history and emotions.
I like that realistic and colorful feeling.
It feels like you are playing live at the venue.A perfect example of leaning into the quality of the space
As a piano, there isn't much to comment on, it's very well put together, the addition of a note release knob was very nice, as it gave a more human feel to my pre-programmed MIDI. However, the room tone is what sells this sample instrument to me, the ability to decide how placed into the space the piano is gives composers plenty of options in terms of how they can approach a piece. This is one of those instruments that can stand all on its own, without filling in the space around it with other instruments or sounds.
Beautiful spacious piano
This piano has an absolutely lovely tone! With some small adjustments I think this would be a go to favorite for many. Playing it definitely made me think about it being in an empty cafe. In fact, I actually prefer playing it with the reverb almost all the way down since it has such a nice space. But there are some velocity issues that distracted from sitting back and enjoying the piano as a whole. The recording is very good, and if you tweak some of the velocity blends/transitions it'll help the piano really shine.
A lovely piano with two levels of play
This piano is sampled really well and it is almost noise free. I find the release triggers too noisy but luckily you can do anything you want with them. It has to offer a nice defined character that is niether too hard or too soft. With that said, while playing you might realise that you will be able to play at two different levels, that greatly differ in terms of volume. That might be a little rough when it comes to performing, but you can always fine-tune everything pretty easily while programming. As a fun note, the range has been extended to the entire virtual keyboard.
Excellent sound but dynamics issues
Very clean sound with lots of character and intimacy feeling.
Unfortunately, as others have mentioned the DS (at least) version has lots of dynamics issues, making it rather unplayable as is.
I've tinkered a bit and fixed what I could, just enough to write a little piece; the corrected .dspreset can be downloaded from: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3pf1nwfhg0obm12/AAAG7vA49nQcszh1jO7-F6ZVa
