Petit Piano from AcousticSamples

Right now, I am snowed under with reviewing UVI‘s latest library, ‘Vintage Legends‘ but I just got an email from another developer, AcousticSamples, who also compile libraries for the UVI engine which also includes MOTU‘s MachFive3 sampler as well as UVI’s own Workstation host. This little, and I use that word deliberately, gem is called Petit Piano and I expected to hear something akin to a toy piano when I clicked play on the demos. Oh how wrong was I! This tiny piece of brilliance has a character all its own but sounds much more like a full size piano than I had expected. Of course, these are the guys that helped UVI with their IRCAM Prepared Piano as well as providing some of the stock libraries for MachFive3. Here’s what the blurb says…

“Petit Piano is a small 50 keys children piano.
This piano is manufactured by a french piano manufacturer called “Klein” and this is the only “Children’s” piano of this size. It features a real wooden keyboard and a 2 string system which makes it sound close to a full sized upright piano and not like a toy.

It is a small piano, but we still wanted to make it as realistic as possible, so we added our top piano features like sympathetic resonances, true pedal action, or really accurate release samples to get great sounding staccatos.
We recorded 6 velocity layers as well as key noises, resonances, release samples, pedal noises, etc… and you can control every bit of it using the interface.

petitpianoscreen

The default interface gives you access to many parameters.


Volumes:

  • The release samples volume.
  • The pedal noises volume.
  • The keys up volume.
  • The pedal down resonances volume.
  • The volume of the sympathetic resonances.
  • The true pedal action allows you to decide if pressing the pedal down when notes are held with trigger the pedal down and smoothly fade it in, just like on a real piano.



    • Effects:

  • We added a built-in tone control for a brighter or darker sound.
  • The reverb is based on high quality impulse responses that you can choose from the interface.
  • You also get complete control over the dry and wet volume of the reverb.



    • Midi:

  • The dynamics controls the volume of the low velocities.
  • The Vel Curve (Velocity curve) controls how the volume answers to the velocity of your keyboard.
  • The MIDI curve controls is a velocity re-mapper.



    • Technical description

  • 1.29GB, 859 samples.
  • 6 Velocity layers for the sustain.
  • 6 Velocities for the release.
  • Pedal and key noises.
  • Pedal down resonances.
  • Sympathetic resonances.
  • True pedal action.
  • Access to impulse response list.
  • Tone control.
  • Advanced UVI scripting giving you access to a simple yet powerful interface and advanced features.”

    • Take a listen to the audio samples and I don’t think you will need much convincing that that this little beauty is worth every penny. Talking of which, until the end of the year, it’s on offer, reduced by 30% from €49/£38/$60 to €34/£27/$42.

    http://acousticsamples.net/petitpiano



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