Homegrown Sounds has announced the release of Homegrown Piano, a new VST instrument plug-in for Windows based around 88 samples of a Steinway B Grand Piano which were recorded at medium velocity. It was developed like many other HGSounds products to be great for Ambient/Atmospheric music, though is useful as a standard piano. The 128 presets cover a diverse range of sounds from Standard, Honky Tonk, Bright, as well as many echo landscapes, high resonance/distorted, and synthetic instruments. Though it is primarily designed as a piano, it is still a synthesizer at heart and as a result has plenty of experimental potential.

The plug-in uses 2 duplicate piano layers, the second of which can be manipulated in several ways leading to a diverse range of piano-based instruments. It can be either identical to Piano 1 allowing slight detuning to achieve chorus-type sounds, or relationally tuned by -/+ 1 octave, as well as detuning this will either dull or brighten the sound (for example allowing more harpsichord-type sounds). Additionally the entire instrument can be tuned via octaves, semitones and fine tunings, and can also be positionally shifted -2/+2 octaves which moves the positions of the samples as opposed to actual detuning. Piano 2 may also be Looped (with adjustable loop points), looped back and forth, shifted by -1 octave and reversed.

The piano also features an FX section consisting of Drive, SoundScaper - a reverb/comb/delay effect great for building complex atmospheres, a flanger/filter with a complex LFO, and a BPM-synced stereo delay. There are 3 FX Routing Modes which allows some flexibility in the sound of the FX. There is also an arpeggiator with many modes.

Finally, the piano also contains a microtuner which uses standard scala files, opening up a huge world of custom tuning possibilities, and comes with 300 tunings as standard and stretch/shrink capabilities.

Features:

• Dual Piano Layers - The 2 layers use 88 x 16bit 48k samples, one for each note.
• Filter - Cascadable up to 8 times and includes Low Passes, Hi Passes, Band Passes, Comb, Low Shelf, Hi Shelf and Peak.
• 2 ADSR Envelopes - Simple Envelopes. Envelope 2 can either be used to control Piano 2 volume or used to shape the Filter Cutoff Frequency.
• Drive - Auto Volume Distortion
• Arpeggiator - With many modes include classic Arp modes.
• Microtuner - Microtuner uses most standard Scala files of any size for custom tunings
• SoundScaper - Comb / Delay / Reverb Effect for creating interesting soundscapes.
• Flanger/Filter - Switchable between Flanger and Filter effect, LFO has over 300 predefined shapes with smooth control as well as standard shapes.
• Stereo BPM based Delay - Synced delay.
• FX Routing - 3 different Paths available.
• Drift - Adds a random pitch detune with each note played.
• Stereo Spread - Allows setting a random value to the Pan of each voice.
• Recorder - Allows recording directly to disk at 16/24/32 bits. Wavs are auto-named by date and location is set via a config file.
• Limiter - Output is limited to prevent clipping.
• Default - Sets Piano to default settings
• Randomize - Randomizes all settings. There are also local randomizers in each section.

Priced at £30, Homegrown Piano is available now as a new VST instrument plug-in for Windows.