The story
This is a Grotrian Braunschweig Upright Piano which also lives in the Kilden Theatre in Norway. Whilst I was recording their Concert Grand (also available on Pianobook) I grabbed a chance to continue experimenting in a practice room.
The Piano itself has a big dynamic range and gets used for practice or gigs, usually by bands touring into the venue, so it sees a lot of different hands and styles.
The Kontakt instrument has the usual Piano notes sampled with Christian’s MVP template, but… it’s also a bit of an experiment in creating continuing textures with the piano too. To do this I recorded a bunch of slow repeated octaves from each note (which can be turned on/off, and aren’t to any specific rhythm) which float around the main piano notes to create a seemingly random array of notes as texture.
Reviews for Kristiansand Octave Cascade
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Instant inspiration
o.k. True confession: It took me a few days to write this review, because midway through the first time, i got distracted playing around and ended up using this sound in a track and completely lost track of what I had been doing. I suppose that's the ultimate compliment I can bestow upon a library, though. It's so good and inspiring that you just have to use it to create music right away. This has overtones of Stratus, but at the same time, the option to reverse the sounds gives it another dimension entirely. This is probably the single most inspiring library I've found to date on the PB site. The one tiny thing I wish was different is I was left wishing for the release control from the ADSR to be available in the GUI. I was wishing that the octave sparkles and reverses could kind of trail off while the main sound stopped. This is easy enough to achieve by digging in to Kontakt, but it would be cool to have it in the GUI. Even so, this library is pretty darn close to perfect. Awesome sauce!!!
Mesmerizing!
This one is really interesting and inspiring. Love the concept and the results are very musical. Would love to see a more developed version with more control over the sound in the GUI.
Olafur watch your back
A lovely sounding piano but the cascading ripple effects are what make this special. You can achieve a sound similar to Olafur Arnald's stratus with very little effort and lots of control.
Optional magic included!
Although there are some noise problems from the sampling, this piano has trully incredible potential. The piano sound itself is very nice, with extra trigger sounds included that you can volume-adjust to your liking. The magic starts when you introduce the Octave and Reverse effects! You just have to witness them yourself in order to appreciate them. I'd personally like a smoother attack on the Reverse though, and smoother releases in general, but there are no options for those.
I'd personally also like a different kind of GUI design, because the default Kontakt buttons are not that great and they certainly don't match the character and potential of this wonderful idea.
Evolving, twinkling piano
Natural sounding and organically changing ping pong delay style piano. The piano itself sounds beautiful and has been recorded extremely well so the rest is a bonus. You can use the piano unadulterated or with all the sprinkles and it feels like you have great control over your sound design with nice subtle effect level knobs.
