The story
My name is Bob Ellis and I am a retired RAF/Commercial pilot and Oil Refinery Process Operator who produces music as a near full time hobby!
My wife plays piano and I struggle along but use it for composing synth/sampled based songs. It currently resides in our bar which doubles up as Studio9 recording studio for my music project Season3. It is also currently played by our 5 year old grandaughter and hope it remains in the family for many years to come.
I spotted Pianobook on YouTube and Christian inspired me to sample the piano which I now plan to use in future compositions.
PS. To help others I created a Cubase 10 Pro template and with its Cycle Markers made it very easy to export after the mic recordings were mixed and denoised. I have also produced a guide for the process.
Reviews for Monington and Weston (M&W)
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A real songwriter's piano. Beautiful sound, lots of potential!
This is a wonderful sounding instrument. It instantly gives the user that living room Piano sound. You definitely feel like you're sat in front of it. There's a feeling that this is a proper songwriter's piano. It just evokes The Beatles style chord progressions when you play it. I would love to see a v2.0 with more dynamic layers perhaps one below and one above the two that are currently there, as well as some round robins. But so far this is a really well recorded and programmed piano that will definitely get a lot of use from me and I'm sure many others!
Bright Saloon
This piano has that bright saloon type vibe. The recording is pretty solid. Personally being into more warm and cinematic felts in not in love with this one but i know alot of people like this sound so its great to have the option. Its so cool that theres every different type of piano you could ever want on pianobook. A big downside to this for me is dynamics. I like my sample pianos to be dynamic and this one isn't very responsive. There are alot of pianos on pianobook i would reach for before this one but i still encourage you to try this out. By trying out all these different pianos, we learn what characteristics we like and dislike in a piano which is super cool
Lovely but a little inconsistent
This piano sounds absolutely lovely and the sampling seems very good, there is a problem when it comes to the key noise that might turn some users off. Some keys have a very harsh click, and others don't have any at all. Since there are no round robins or multiple velocity layers - which is generally fine - in this case playing for a while won't seem as unique as your first time playing it. Inside the GUI you will find two knobs, one of which is a volume that's the same with the default instrument volume, and a reverb setting which creates a heavy echo.
A nice piano
This piano is nice. It is not particularly dynamic, and even when you really dig in, it's not going to give you much response. The sound in the low end is somewhat distant, as though it needs some compression, or as though it would have benefitted from a slightly different mic position. It's tonally very even across the range, which is good, and fairly in tune. The editing within Kontakt is unfortunately very inconsistent. Some zones have a sizable gap between the start of the sample and onset of sound, while others cut off the entire attack portion of the sample and begin partway through. This decreases playability significantly. It's getting harder and harder to stand out on the PB site with straight up piano samples. While this instrument is nice, it's not particularly playable or special sounding. It would be great if the editing was better, if the dynamic response was better, and then if it has something unique going for it in terms of effects or processing or something else.
