Walkthrough of this piano library from Cinesamples.

Background information:

With a mind to the handful of historic pictures from  the recording Kind of Blue  our engineer Tim Starnes (Drums of War, HollywoodWinds, Cinesnares, Cinetoms 2, CineCrash) set up three sets of microphones.  The first pair – the U49’s from old Columbia set up in historical position (note that the original was in mono), the two other pairs each set back a touch further from the other.

We recorded two signal chains for each mic, a clean signal going through the Neve board and one going through a historic tape machine and finally into pro tools.  We highly suggest exploring the charming colorization of the tape signal but both are provided for your convenience.   For some of the youngsters out there note that tape will alter the sound of medium to high gain velocity layers and that  often engineers go through great lengths to achieve this distortion.

Due to the delightful variances in timbre with each key the piano was sampled chromatically; this was the only way to get a true representation of the instrument. Barry was the pianist for the sampling and he employed a unique strategy.

“Perhaps this library benefits from having someone so intimate with sampling striking the keys. The way this particular piano was voiced was very unusual and charming. Certain notes when struck with matching velocities would sound rather different in tone from one another. One would scarcely notice this in a session but it would be greatly amplified via sampling. We decided the most faithful way to capture the samples was to do it by ear, rather then by touch. Instead of concentrating on a perfect velocity match across the keyboard we listened for sweet-spots/landmarks, identifiable, pleasing string to hammer ratios. This is a method employed by pianists to layer notes upon one another with clarity. I think the end result is better for recording in this manner rather then a straight key-weight dependent system.”

We sincerely hope you enjoy this piano as much as we do.

PIANO SPECS:

• 1949 Steinway D via Neve 8078 Console
• 8 Velocity Layers Sampled Chromatically
• 9300 Samples
• 3 Microphone Positions
• Close/Vintage – 2x Neumann M49 near the lid
• Mid – 2x B&K 4007 at the tail of the piano
• Far – 2x Sennheiser MKH20′s in the hall
• 2 Processing Paths (Tape; Direct in)
• Studer A800MKIII  24 Track Analog Tape Machine
• Programmed by Sam Estes; scripted by Greg Schlaepfer; recorded by Tim Starnes
  As always we share our revenue with our brilliant team of programmers, engineers, editors and musicians.
  

Comments are closed.