Soundiron has introduced The Drinking Piano, a piano sound library for Native Instruments Kontakt.
This fat-bottomed monster upright has a classic beer hall sound, evoking that signature sound of the roaring 20s and pre-war 30s. Captured with a historic Ivors & Pond upright, it has all of the wear and tear that you’d expect from a hundred-year-old instrument that has been played hard and put away wet, night after night, decade after decade. With a bassy, wide and fully present sound, we put you right on the old bench with the well-worn, cracked ivories under your fingers. We recorded it with large-diaphragm mics on the strings in a small hall, giving it all the body of a dry studio recording with just a hint of live ambiance in the tail.
The years of alcohol-fueled revelry have been less than kind to this once stately instrument. With worn and rickety key action, unreliable dampers, loose pedal mechanics, wear hardened felts, the occasional misaligned hammer and decades of baked-in dust, every key has all the character and frailty of a hundred-year-old bartender. But beneath the beer stains and cigarette burns, this massive aging troubadour has a substantial pedigree. It’s an original Ivors and Pond model from the dawn of the 20th century, made of solid mahogany, with expert hand-craftsmanship and detail rarely seen in any modern uprights.
Drinking Piano GUIWeighing in at 5.25 GB, The Drinking Piano features 25 Kontakt presets, over 1700 samples and over 50 custom convolution impulses. We’ve included standard and Lite presets, along with 16 special custom FX patches that take the sound in new directions. As always there is a range of automatable LFO, EQ, filter and sound-shaping to expand on the creative possibilities that this library offers. Pour yourself a glass of your favorite spirit and enjoy!
The Drinking Piano features the latest version of our Uberpeggiator arp system, optional tempo synching tremolo and resonant filter LFOs, custom convolution reverbs, parametric EQ and standard performance shaping parameters. Note Attack and Offset allow you to tighten the sound and create pad-like effects. You also have complete control over release timing and volume with extended decay settings, as well as separate pedal and hardware SFX.
Micro-tuning and stereo-imaging allow you to fine-tune how the piano sits in your mix with other instruments. The special Sober/Drunk switch gives you the ability to instantly tighten the sound wiping away years of wear and tear or hear the piano as it naturally sounds; a bit rough around the edges. The Tuned/Untuned switch corrects the tuning of the entire piano, getting it about as close as it will ever be again to 440 and fixing the misaligned hammer action that can be heard souring a few notes here and there.
The library is now available to purchase for $79 USD.
More information: Soundiron / The Drinking Piano