I’m dating myself.
Rewind to the 1990s I was working in a music store and I found that I could be successful as a salesperson by making custom sounds for customers. This started with custom patches but evolved in to specialized sampling sessions.

One customer, a Steinway artist was interested in buying an instrument that would allow him to have the sound of his personal grand piano. He purchased a Kurzweil K2500 and then we went on to sample his remarkable Steinway D.

This select Steinway D was one of the elite instruments chosen to be part of Steinway’s Concert and Artist stock at Steinway Hall, New York. This exquisite concert grand piano was a favorite of Vladimir Horowitz and it was used by him in his home and on tour. After being used at the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Steinway D was then stationed at Carnegie Hall. It was later transfered to Steinway’s retail division and sold to the legendary Capricorn Studios. There it was used by the Allman Brothers, Dr. John and a host of other great records until the studio closed in the Mid-70’s. The Steinway is now in Columbus, Ohio and is owned by recording artist Kim Pensyl.

When this sample was created, we never imagined we’d have unlimited sample memory. In fact the original version of this at 64MB was considered unreasonable and gigantic. We did testing at various velocity levels but ultimately decided that a single velocity sample, allowing for longer samples, minimizing split points would be best and allowing the Kurzweil engine to control the tone and dynamics as much as possible. The piano was recorded with a pair of Coles 4038 ribbon mics. Editing, noise reduction and looping was done in Sonic Foundry’s Sound Forge, transferred to the Kurzweil via SMDI where I made the final instrument.

This sample, along with many others I made ended up on a sample CD-ROM called KeySolutions for Kurzweil instruments. This library also launched my career in the music industry as I later went to work for Sonic Foundry, Kurzweil, Yamaha, TC Electronic and now Casio.

This piano has been used on countless albums, most notably it was used by keyboardist Jon Carin on tours with Pink Floyd.

This is the first conversion of this sample into software format. In terms of playability it is close to the original Kurzweil version but not identical yet, I’ll continue to work on this. I also went back to the original recorded and added some key-off samples which weren’t present in the original Kurzweil version.

Pianobook is an absolute marvel and I’m amazed at the efforts of everyone here. I have an extensive library of custom samples, much more to come.