A continuation of our popular “character pianos” collection. Brilliant piano harmonics played by the stunning Steinway D concert grand. Deeply sampled in a concert hall with a variety of forward-looking microphones. Designed for Kontakt with the composers of contemporary films and TV series in mind.
Glacier Keys is a collection of piano harmonics played on a Steinway D concert grand and sampled in incredible detail in a modern concert hall setting. Harmonics are created by carefully placing your finger in the middle of the string, creating a pitch one octave above the natural note of the string, resulting in a beautiful “glassy” timbre, perfect for neoclassical, ambient and minimalist compositions or any other situation where you need a piano with a more notalgic sound or brilliant tone than usual.
Although this is a library of “advanced techniques”, we have made special efforts to make it as easy to play as possible. You can approach it in the same way as a regular piano – it is programmed so that the C of the first octave sounds like the C of the first octave, even if the actual key that produced the note was one octave lower. We also positioned the near microphones to the left than usual so that the stereo image is centered around this sounding C.
The instrument was recorded in a modern concert hall using a set of 14 overhead microphones (DPA, Coles, Neumann) placed around the piano and further down the room. From these signals, we have created 3 easy-to-use mixes (Close, Mid and Far), giving you the flexibility to create your own mix that suits your needs, whether you need dry “studio” sound or surround sound that will be in the background of the mix.
As with our other piano libraries, we put in extra effort and captured the details of the instrument beyond the notes themselves. You can control the amount of mechanical noise produced when you release the keys and use the sustain pedal. For this library, we developed a method to isolate resonance when the pedal is pressed, which means that we can offer control over the amount of resonance that occurs when the pedal is pressed. This also means that resonance will occur when the pedal is depressed, when notes are already being held, not just the notes that are played after the pedal is depressed.
• Piano harmonics performed on a Steinway Model D concert grand.
• Beautifully delicate, cinematic and nuanced sound.
• Recorded in a modern concert hall environment, with 3 mixable microphone positions.
• 3 custom sound-design atmosphere layers.
• Controllable key noise, pedal noise, and sympathetic resonance.
• Simple and user-friendly interface.
• Full NKS support – works with Komplete Kontrol hardware.
• 4.9GB download size (NCW compressed from a 9.5GB sample pool).