The story
I was thinking about sharing the instruments we have at the studio.
Here you have the toy piano we have in our studio. Hope you enjoy it. With round robins, release notes and a weird E that sounds like it is processed with a glitch machine,… things that happen while sampling.
As I’ve already said; with its natural limitations. So I didn’t expand the notes to lower or higher notes. As it is.
Hope you enjoy it.
Any comment will be welcomed.
Hugs
Interface
Reviews for Toy Piano
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- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
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Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A dream scape
A fabulous simple sound reminiscent of childhood.
Turn the reverb up and the tone down a little play simple open voice arpeggios and there you have a dreamy soundtrack to a children’s story.Warts and all!
Its a toy piano! Which kind of belittles what the instrument is, by associating it with toys and implying that it is not a real piano.
What it really is, is a musical instrument that has a different 'action' to that other larger, more expensive type of piano, and it deserves exactly the same care and attention in recording. Actually, maybe more, because all of those high frequencies and inharmonics are probably harder to get right than the more constrained, damped and controlled output of a conventional piano.
So there are three round-robins (for notes AND for releases!), no velocity layers (I appreciate that the limited mechanism probably severely limits the scope for velocity, but I would be interested to see what is possible...), and stereo output from a single X/Y pair of mics. More mic positions in a 'name' space would have kicked it into having more appeal for Christian Henson, but these days, there are plenty of convolution reverbs that will get you close (pun!) to that for less expense.
There's a huge variation of timbre across the range of notes, including an E that is highlighted in 'The Story', and I would be SO tempted to break all of G's 'natural limitations' rules and re-pitch/map these to velocity layers of a single note, and then use Decent Sampler's pitch transposition to give a range of notes. Kind of a resynthesized kids' piano...
But from what G gives us within the rule set, there are some wonderful sounds here. The F1 takes me straight back to my childhood, and the sound of the bell on a double decker bus, activated by that strip of ribbed black rubber in a polished aluminium extrusion on the ceiling, and so accessible only by adults rather than kids. But memory is an interesting thing - the 'bus ding' sound is nearly there, but not quite. I'm amazed that my mind can take a sound from 50 years ago and compare it to the F1 in this virtual instrument and say: 'Yep, close, but no cigar, mate...'
The 'Tone' rotary control is a little harsh - below half-way and it cuts out just about all the sound for me, and the colour is rather muted, so I took a UI star away for that. But the Reverb rotary control is a very pleasant bright blue and gives just enough reverb to ground the piano in an acoustic space. As I said, I'd be tempted to go hi-tech here, with multiple mic positions, convolution reverbs, maybe even vintage reverb, or even a 'tape emulation' pedal for full CH-appeal. And there again, maybe I wouldn't. Sometimes, warts and imperfections are what makes an instrument special, and technology then allows synthetic augmentation or degradation as you wish.
I'm delighted that Pianobook.co.uk allows a detailed capture of an instrument that is often overlooked or derided. Yamaha got a lot of snarky comments when their Reface CP instrument included a 'Toy Piano' preset amongst the spot-on emulations of electric pianos, electric grands (my first loves, the CP-70B and CP-80!), clavinet and the hidden acoustic piano, but I think they knew exactly what they were doing, and this sample pack, for me, is total confirmation!
Overall, then a very faithful, careful, capture of a classic instrument that can strongly evoke memories from the past. Brill!
(If G Guevara has the time, then I would be very interested in doing a joint 'resynthesized' Pianobook.co.uk sample pack using the sample from Toy Piano, as I outlined in the review above. Please contact me via discord, or via martin.russ@owasp.org)
A nice toy piano with release triggers!
This is a small little toy piano that has been sampled very well, that comes with a cute release trigger and a nice reverb. You will also find a tone/filter knob that is not bound to the modwheel by default as usual. It is just 2 octaves long and it comes with 3 round robbins, including the release trigger, which is great!
It is mostly panned to the left, so keep that in mind while mixing it with other instruments.
Memory lane
A faithful rendition of a toy piano, with all the appropriate clanks and key noises included.
If you're intending to evoke a certain mood, this may just be the thing.
