Sonicsmiths Piano In Blue [KONTAKT]

Piano In Blue captures the historic sound of the Steinway D concert grand piano used at Columbia Records for Miles Davis’ “Kind Of Blue” and Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations.” Experience a beautifully playable grand piano, encoded for the free Native Instruments Kontakt Player 6.6.1 and Komplete Kontrol. The opportunity to preserve this iconic combination of this piano in this space has been worthwhile, and now we are able to make it available to music creators worldwide.

As of October 2021, Piano In Blue has been updated to be compatible with the free Kontakt Player 6.6.1+ as well as NKS encoding, and can now be downloaded and installed directly via the Native Access application. This update puts Piano In Blue right in the Libraries tab of Kontakt for easy access, and includes improvements to performance and sound quality.

The Direct samples have been meticulously treated and de-noised for this latest update. The library had undergone de-noising for a previous update, and this was done again for the Direct samples for the latest NKS update in the fall of 2021. This newest treatment allows the warm richness of the library to come through cleanly and expose the character of this instrument in a natural, playable, controlled way.

With a mind to the handful of historic pictures from the recording from Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” our engineer set up three sets of microphones. The first pair – the M49’s from the old Columbia setup, with the same placement (using stereo placement rather than mono), and with the two other pairs each set successively farther back.

We recorded two signal chains for each mic, a clean signal going through the Neve console 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. Note that the Tape samples do have a higher-gain sound, and we include a Noise knob so you can control the baseline level of tape hiss to help prevent samples going to complete silence.

The piano was sampled chromatically — one key at a time — exposing delightful variances in timbre with each key. This was the only way to get a true representation of the instrument. The piano was meticulously sampled by hand, with careful consideration for what works best with a sampled piano, all throughout the recording session itself and at every stage of production thereafter.

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