Xtended Piano - Five star review in Sound on Sound

[soniccouture]

FULL REVIEW HERE


"Soniccouture have been a bit clever here, offering a handful of Kontakt Player instruments that provide the colour and character of this unusual sound world, but that are also musically useful..

Bowed Piano : ..the sound is strangely beautiful and evocative. In different registers, you're reminded of tamburas, wine glasses and waterphones, and the short articulation is weirdly clarinet‑like low down. Smart alternate sample allocation creates a remarkable sense of aliveness and subtle unpredictability.

Mallet Piano : ..It lends itself to African or Indonesian‑inspired ostinato accompaniments, as if it were a giant thumb piano. Equally, it's just perfect for those sparse, dislocated bass note stabs — think Jerry Goldsmith and Planet Of The Apes and you're right there.

Mute Piano : ..Played conventionally from its keys while the strings are lightly touched on a harmonic node, the sound produced is an octave and a fifth higher than the fundamental: luckily, Xtended Piano does the appropriate pitch remapping for you. Key‑release noise is adjustable from 'off' to thunderous. As for musical character, this one's schizophrenic: harp‑like and delicate at one end of the velocity scale, noisy with a sort of Bartok pizzicato snap at the other.

Plucked Piano : ..Winning the beauty contest, undoubtedly, is Plucked Piano. Its two variations, one damped and one not, have the strings plucked by hand with a Jim Dunlop USA Nylon 0.73mm plectrum. With no damping, the strings ring for a long time, as if it were some huge, über‑resonant dulcimer.

SFX Piano : ..Count Dracula's coffin lid meets Radiophonic Workshop! I doubt it will show up in your next hit record, but they'll fit right into a horror-film score or dark computer-game soundtrack.

The Performance Tab : ..A real pièce de resistance is the Performance tab. As well as some basic real‑time parameters that I've mentioned before (like articulation key‑switching), what appears here depends on what instrument is loaded. The Bowed Piano gets a truly weird and wonderful Glissando module, unlike any portamento or pitch‑bend implementation I've seen before, that winds sustained tones up and down in pitch over the entire audible pitch range and beyond. It's instant horror suspense, but push it further and you're into bizarre, gurgling aliasing territory. The Mallet and Mute Pianos have a 'Jammer' instead, which is a sort of semi‑randomised arpeggiator that can do tremolando and more besides. Even better, though, is the Plucked Piano's 'Strummer': hold down some notes, turn the mod wheel, and it triggers them repeatedly across many octaves, as if you're running your fingers up and down a vast autoharp."

Robin Bigwood June 2011