The story
This was my first time making a sample pack and initially wanted to start with something small and simple. I bought a toy piano secondhand, and then realized I am allergic to keeping things simple, so I tried to think of a few ways I could mess with it.
Prepared piano is usually done with objects that can be laid across strings, but the rods of this instrument were upright so I had to figure out what I could use that wouldnt fall off. After a lot of experimenting I came up with the 4 I ended up using.
Having multiple mic perspectives was important to me because I think it makes it easier to customize your sound, even on a tiny instrument with limited range like this one. This is also a very noisy clicky instrument in real life so it was important to incorporate that too.
This is a very DIY project. I recorded it in a bedroom under a blanket with two independent recording devices. I tried to keep the DIY aesthetic, but also be very flexible and functional!
Interface
Reviews for Prepared Toy Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Amazing
Incredible sound and fantastic touch response; a sample to have necessarily in your library.
A musical typewriter!?
This is a deeply sampled toy piano that comes in 5 different patches that feature a different way of sampling the piano, and every single one has a different sound on it. They are all recored with 4 different mics that can be mixed however the user wants and they come with a lot of handy options in a nicely designed GUI.
All the patches sound really good, and the noise that comes off of the non-regular ones makes the piano sound like a musical typewriter, as my title suggests! You might hear something completely different, but I found that simply beautiful and quite unique.
Fun instrument
This is a really fun instrument to play with. It might even fit in some more traditional tracks in the right place, but it's definitely something to be kept in the arsenal in case of writing something for the soundtrack of a game.
Incredibly detailed toy-piano
This might as well be called the ASMR piano, the sounds are really nice, and it is sampled very deeply, with 4 mics, 3 dynamic layers, and three round robins. This all makes it a very awesome instrument. A toy piano like this is not something I would quickly use in my compositions. But I have to say, I could play around with this for hours and still have fun, it is truly wonderful and of high quality.
