The story
I am currently aged 17 and have been playing Piano since I was 6, I then quickly took up Percussion and Trumpet to. When I first started sampling a few years ago these are what I focused on, I started with untuned percussion as a means of getting to grips with groove agent (the Cubase sampler). But I quickly branched out into tuned percussion, this is where I really started to explore the idea of velocity layers and round robins. Then recently I finally splashed out on Kontakt and am now obsessed with sampling! I took on a very ambitious project in completely sampling my piano which took ages, but it has been extremely rewarding and has added to my collection of templates that I am making for my instruments in Kontakt, I am very excited to sample many more instruments soon especially strings!
I have had this Piano ever since I was born and I absolutely adore it! It has certainly had a good bashing as well as a good range of music played on it as a huge variety of music being played on it, from the Classical Period all the up to the most recent film music! I decided to sample it not only to try and capture its sound but also to try understand the process of deeply sampling an instrument with so many notes! I was fortunate to get hold of some Audio Technica 4033a’s to use as my mics, I am not yet very good at recording so the quality of the sound is hopefully to be improved upon when I next sample a piano but overall I am pleased with the result. I was really fortunate to get some help with the scripting but one thing I haven’t worked out yet is how to stop the release triggers geting sustained by the pedal, any help would be most appreciated. Also I would be very grateful if someone could noise reduce the piano for me!
Reviews for Schimmel Piano
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Large and in charge
This upright is really playable, very in your face and a little midrangey. There's no shortage of options for tweaking right from the get go on the front panel, and the controls feel good / make sense. My biggest want from this piano is a little more natural width, the recording is very obviously stereo but feels a little on the narrow side. The release samples feel really good and its quite a large file size. The tuning isn't perfect, and its perfectly fine like that. If you're of the one and done type, I would replace a lot of sampler upright pianos with this, being aware of the caveats above.
Better than most commercial ones
Extremally detailed and well sampled, despite huge, a very professional work.
Just needs more familiarity with with Kontakt interface to improve the GUI, but this is a problem easy to solve futurely.Does size matter in the end?
The answer is probably not, if you know what you are doing. While this download pack is 5GB, the actual uncompressed folder is almost 14GB, and it might be a little excessive! Despite the enormous size, the samples themselves can be quite noisy at times.
I also noticed a pedal sample which I'd like the option to turn down a bit. I am not sure why there is an ADSR envelope included for such a classical sound, but it exists, so you might find a nice creative use for it. The EQ addition is kinda cool, but it doesn't work for me at all, except for the 100hz knob that adds a rather obvious white noise.
Other than that, the instrument sounds very warm and it would be a shame to go unnoticed.
Big Download Size
This has a pretty big download size so i was definitely expecting a deeply sampled piano, as well as because the instrument is named deep sampled schimmel. This piano i think does deliver on that front, it seems pretty dynamic and there seems to be a decent amount of round robins. The sample maker mentioned they aren't that great at recording yet. Its definitely not bad but its a little low end heavy and could have more clarity. Still for a first sampled piano this is really great and warm. For most peoples first sampled piano they make a really barebones piano instrument with no round robins and one or two dynamic layers. Its really cool that you went the extra mile with this.
A hefty 5gb download gives you a slightly limited but great sounding piano
I'm not entirely sure how this library ends up being a near 5gb download. That is a little bit of a turn off for me. However it has been programmed well and has plenty of features on the GUI. The samples are slightly noisy, but certainly not unusable. The Piano itself is a little thin sounding but that's could well be something you're after. It is an upright after all. Overall the piano sounds great and has a wonderful character. Great Job!
