The story
A dilapidated upright that has been in my family for decades, this Winter piano was recorded in a garage in Maine with a single AT2020. This recreation is not only my first attempt at a Kontakt instrument, but also an immortalization of the piano with which I began my musical journey.
The interface features four knobs to control the volume of two pre-rendered reverbs, a dry mix, and key release noises. The larger central knob controls samples mangled with a custom pedalboard setup to create a rich pad.
I hope this brings as much joy to those who download it as it did for me to create it!
Reviews for Maine Upright
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
So close, yet so distant
What a lovely instrument. It's soft and intimate, but cold in a way. Then there's the pedalboard knob, which just takes it creatively to a whole other place that is distant and rough, but in a good way. Blended together they form a very inspiring instrument that sounds phenomenal. Really fantastic work and thank you for releasing it for free.
What phenominal range this has!
Ok, if you wanted piano that gives you plenty of options in terms of sound, this is your way to go. Both reverbs sound very clean, the pedalboard adds a very lush background tone that blends in extremely well, the Key Noise knob didn't really work for me, I couldn't hear any difference when messing around with it, but aside from that, I'm a big fan of this instrument. It's not a completely clean recording, so it does have some small piano mechanical sounds, but they definitely add to the character rather than draw attention to themselves. A key note I should make though, the instrument does favour longer notes, short notes cut off a little strangely, I like it, but it might be a deterrent for some. The routing as well was a little off, it was set for the maker's original computer as opposed to locating on any computer it's download on, but that was an easy fix by finding the folder I grabbed the .nki file from.
Beautiful tone but a little too staccato.
The tone and recording of this piano i think is really great. It has like a jazzy night club vibe. Very natural and warm. The Piano noises are nice and controllable which is awesome. However i feel like the sustain of the samples is a little short, leading to a staccato type of feeling. Reverb helps alot with this but sometimes you dont want a really reverb sound. I think if this instrument was denoised a bit and if the sustain of the samples was a bit longer, or held onto the sustain longer it could be really great
Another lovely character, but too noisy
The character of this instrument is very playful, and the GUI is awesome. The Pedalboard knob in the middle wins the show, but unfortunately, the noise inside the samples don't let this instrument shine at all, since it's just too much.
Lots of flavor, needs some tweaks
First, let's talk about the sound of this instrument, it's an instrument which is characterful and cool. I love that. The sounds is probably a little bass heavy for my taste, but that can always be corrected with EQ. I LOVE the fact that there's an option to add tasty ambience from a pedal board! That makes this library so much more inspiring and useful. I also think it's really cool that you can turn up plate or hall reverb without turning up the dry signal and thus have only wet signal. I appreciate that the samplist gave us control over key noise in the GUI too! I wish there was less noise in these samples, because that decreases the usefulness. However, the biggest issue for me is that the samples are not trimmed very tightly, and so there's over a 100ms of delay or more between the time a key is played and the time the sample starts. That makes it nearly impossible to get parts to play in time. Some additional time was definitely needed to get that part as good as it could be. Even so, this is a great sounding library and I'm sure it will find a home on many people's hard drives.
