Ships Piano³ takes the original acclaimed Sound Dust Ships Piano sample instrument and adds two more really great sounding character pianos to the mix.
Think of her as a character piano modeller, you can cunningly combine different aspects of each piano to create impossible sounding piano hybrids. Just don't expect the usual bland, silky smooth tones of those other over sampled piano monsters.
The fun doesn't stop there though, Ships Piano³ isn't just a pretty face.
She also comes with the Satie-anator sequencer engine which combined with the key switch operated scale and key commands is a full on inspiration machine!
Ships Piano...a little bit of history
Designed by JB Cramer and Sons of London in the late 1800's, the ships piano (or yacht piano) was built especially for the cramped confines of Victorian pleasure boats. The perfect thing for a little sea bound entertainment in the good old pre-ipod days of the empire.
International adventurer Captain Robert Scott (of the Antarctic) was apparently a fan and always had one onboard for those times when a hearty, spirit lifting sing-along was just the ticket. James Joyce also briefly mentions a ships piano in his book The Dubliners.
These things are very rare and pretty much ignored these days. A ships piano is basically a tiny rudimentary upright piano with a five octave keyboard that folds upwards to save space. It has no bottom half and sits either on a low table or a stand with a small leather and chain contraption dangling from its bottom that loops around the foot for the sustain pedal. Because of its small frame size it struggles with low notes, so the bass strings are very wide gauge and particularly flabby, resulting in a strange almost atonal metallic sound in the lower reaches.
Whats Inside ?
-
School Grand - a binaurally recorded grand piano in an ancient stone walled Hogwartsy school hall/chapel
-
Ships Piano - 4 or 5 notes of velocity, recorded binaurally and re-tuned since the last version - see box for her history
-
Room Upright - binaurally recorded with 3 layers of velocity, the cunning bit is that she was reversed, fed through high end reverb and then reversed again
-
Individual controls for volume, sample start, pan, stereo width, attack curve, ADSR, vibato and reverb send per piano
-
346 24bit samples = 360mb with Native Instruments' propriety compression
-
24 custom convolution reverbs per piano
-
Satie-anator - 12 user programmable, key triggered sequencers with 12 tracks per sequence
-
Scale and pitch quantisers with key switch control
-
Master FX page - master EQ, tape and valve modelling plus transient designer
-
Keyboard Velocity modelling page
-
37 instrument snapshots
-
Handy build in instructions in RTFM page
