It is a long-standing tradition when learning to program; your first program is a simple little thing that displays to the screen, “Hello world!”

Two months ago, I didn’t know a single thing about sampling instruments. Thanks to many in the Pianobook community, I’ve slowly figured out what I needed and how to do it. I found some condenser mics, ordered an Audio Interface, got some mic stands, and found something even rarer: an hour of silence in our house (I’m the dad of two beautiful yet chaotic small kids).

This weekend I sampled and built this instrument and learned a TON. I am excited to try it with different instruments and sounds.

## About this Piano

This piano, a King Upright, was the source of the most significant on-going dispute with my lovely wife. Eight years ago, we both wanted a piano, and her grandmother had a friend who was moving and needed to sell her used upright. My wife texted me the price, and my mouth hit the floor: $7,000. There was no way I was paying that much for this type of piano. We might as well save up a little more and buy a fantastic Baby Grand!

This tense debate went on for weeks. My wife’s grandma kept calling and texting, asking, “when are you going to buy and pick up the piano?” Her friends were moving soon, and she already committed us to buy the piano. Finally, my wife said: “Look, I had the money in a savings account, so I went ahead and paid for it, and piano movers are bringing it to our house tomorrow.” It got her grandma off her back, and the dispute could end: a decision was made.

It was a pretty sore spot for our otherwise pretty awesome marriage. We never talked about it, and just moved on. The piano was good, pretty out of tune, but worked for helping teach the kids.

Just last year I made a joke about the “Seven Grand Fleecing” we got early in our marriage with that piano.

“Seven grand? Uh, no, it was seven HUNDRED dollars, sweetie.”

….

For seven years, we had never spoken the actual price of the piano. Whether her finger or my brain added the extra zero, it doesn’t really matter. Every discussion, debate, and argument only referenced the price abstractly, which literally was an order of magnitude difference.

We laugh now and are happy the sore spot is resolved.

## About the Sampled Instrument

I would love feedback on this instrument and any tips for future ones. I used Adobe Audition for noise reduction, and just used the default presets. It seems to have worked pretty well?

One snafu on the original vs noise reduced samples: I used the wave editor to do some fadeouts on the release triggers to reduce some clicks, but those are not applied to the originals.