Putty Piano is an experimented-prepared piano sample library that has its strings dampened with thick blue poster putty. The effect of this is a muted sustain, with a sharp attack and a soft resonance.
The piano is an emulation of the vintage 1950s British household upright, which is full of character and quirks. riotaudio, which are the makers of Putty Piano has done a good job in creating this library, additionally, they added two extra layers of mechanical and human noise elements (simulation of a pianist moving around, and turning pages on score) for an added realistic feel.
While most people aren't that concerned about using sustain pedals in a virtual piano (I never do), Putty Piano incorporates sustain pedal sounds with an additional "Body" layer (a composite of an Ebow-driven piano string, and a sine wave).
The Body layer can be used to dial back in some resonance and tonal sustain to the relatively muted sustain of the dampened string sound.
Putty Piano Parameters and Controls:
- 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
- Delay time: length of delay intervals
- Reverb: The amount of reverb send (Lexicon Digital Reverb Model)
Length: length of the reverb tail - 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 an 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.
Putty Piano Contains:
- 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
- Requires Kontakt 5.8
- 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.
Video Walkthrough:
Note: It is currently 85% off on audio plugin.deals, so, you might want to hurry up as the deal would be off in 13 days as of the time of writing this review.