an upright piano, touched
a unique means of recording gives piano macro an ultra-intimate personality all of its own. a stethoscopic take on my childhood piano.
the story
it all started when i decided to make an album using nothing but contact microphones. they enable a totally unique form of listening, and i soon became obsessed. all of a sudden everything is an instrument: water, cans, paper, and everything in between.
but people overlook "real" instruments through contact microphones. you can't get any closer to an instrument than actually touching it, and so you really can't get any more intimate either. all of the microscopic sounds of materials and mechanics and movement are suddenly revealed. it is totally transformative.
long after the album was finished, i never forgot the particularly special sound of a piano through a contact microphone. and so, many months later on a stormy december evening, i sat at the piano - a beautiful, dusty knight upright which used to sit in the hall of my primary school - and begun to sample note after plaintive note through the delicate ear of my contact microphone.
realising i was no longer restricted to using exclusively contact microphones, i decided to supplement closeness with distance. a dynamic microphone supports the contact microphone, contrasting its detailed magnification with a more balanced, rounded sound. in the final plugin, you can choose whichever blend of these signals you prefer. speaking of which...
the instrument
unique, but also deep.
...but also somehow simple.
but what about the numbers?
every key(!) sampled individually - 3 velocities, each with 3x round robin
24-bit samples; 48kHz sample rate
5.32GB install size
works on the full version of kontakt 7.6.1 or newer - will not work on the free "kontakt player" plugin!
piano macro lets you blend and independently pan two simultaneous signals: "contact" controls the contact microphone's signal, while "distance" lets you balance this with a more rounded and traditional dynamic mic. run this through some easy-access effects processing, and that's it! no more analysis paralysis :)
the sounds
here's an overview video to give you a better idea of the whole thing.
okay, fine... but how does it sound?
and for more sounds, here are a couple of demos below.
