Putty Piano

Experimental Prepared Piano Library

In this sample library, Riot Audio has taken an experimental approach by dampening the piano strings with thick blue poster putty (mostly known for being great for sticking posters to walls in rented accommodation!). The result is a finely tuned balance between resonance and the sharp, rubbery attack that is unique to this way of preparing the piano.

The piano is a vintage 1950s British household upright – full of character and quirks. Riot Audio added two extra layers of mechanical and human noise elements (e.g. pianist moving around, turning pages on a score) to dial in as you wish for an extra realistic feel, as well as an adjustable layer of sustain pedal sounds. There is also an additional “Body” layer – a composite of an Ebow-driven piano string, and a sine wave. This can be used to dial back in some resonance and tonal sustain to the relatively muted sustain of the dampened string sound.

If it’s a unique variation on old favourite and tons of character you’re after, this library is the perfect addition to your piano sample collection.

Kontakt Instrument

Putty Piano is a one-page Kontakt instrument with a few carefully selected controls:

Shape

• Body: lets you shape how much of the soft, sine-like ring you’d like to hear – from zero (dead, very percussive) to a fairly audible soft ringing resonance
• Decay: this controls the length of the decay at the end of the note
• Brightness: this controls how much of the hammer tap you hear. Because of the dampening putty, the attack can be very sharp and this control allows for some softening of the higher frequencies in that early part of the samples

FX

• Delay: Amount of delay
• Delay time: length of delay intervals
• Reverb: amount of reverb send (Lexicon Digital Reverb Model)
• Length: length of reverb tail

Noise Layers

• Hammer: controls the volume for the “hammer” layer – the separate layer of the hammer falling back onto the felt. This is great for bringing in a sense of realism and authentic close-mic’ed feel.
• Pedal: Sets the volume of the sustain pedal noises
• Human: this controls the amount of random player-generated noise, for example shuffling, paper moving, pedal rattles etc.

Instrument

• Vintage Bentley British-made 1950s household upright with original worn strings - Dampened with BlutackTM poster putty

Features

• 1.03 GB sample content
• 24 bit 48 khz sampling
• Lexicon Digital Reverb Modelling
• Hammer release, sustain pedal and player noise layers
• Additional Ebow & Sine wave layer for added body and shimmering resonance
• Snapshots/Patches: A Little Body, Forlorn, Gentle Ripples, Gymnopedie No.1, In the Room, Pawprints in the Snow, Short and Snappy, Soft and Mallet-like.

Requires Kontakt version 5.8 or higher (full version).