This instrument (Elegy) was originally created for our Patreon community. It was then included in the complete Subliminal Keys Collection, and today we are pleased to offer it to the Pianobook community.

During a creative exchange with our friend James Yates from Majetone, he generously offered to give us some samples captured somewhere in a piano museum in Hungary in 2014.

Far from being a collection of the greatest pianos of all time, these few samples arrived in our email box with a nice little note: “go wild!”
This was the basis for the work of Subliminal Keys.

Imagine an instrument combining two Mellotrons and two wavetable synthesizers… That’s Subliminal Keys.
Sometimes granular, sometimes Mellotron-ish, always a bit strange.

Distorted samples of strange pianos, a few haphazard notes recorded in a place James himself no longer remembers. It’s a dream for sound design work: you have the sound but you can’t determine the exact context, so the final instrument will have to create this missing context!

The other instrument fragments follow this founding principle: a dive into 20 years of archived recordings on old hard disks, old tapes from the 90s, wild recording sessions on 8mm video tapes…

The context is lost, forgotten: let’s recreate it.

Subliminal Keys is built as a sound creation studio allowing you to mix up to 4 polyphonic sources at the same time.

This mixing is done both by adjusting the volume of each source and by interweaving their harmonic content. The concept is always to propose an approach based on experimentation and the pleasure of playing with sound.

Contributors

Fluidshell Design

Resposible for UI & Scripting. Samples provided by James YATES from Majetone.