Felt Piano

Why be a jack of all trades when you can be a master of one? It is this sentiment and reason why we have searched high and low for the most sensitive, beautiful, sonorous, and honest piano sound. Perfect for those delicate ballads (think "Mad World" by Gary Jules) that intimate heart rendering cue (think Newman's "American Beauty"). When carrying out sampling experiments some years ago we discovered the very beautiful world of an upright piano with a middle "practice felt" or "celeste" pedal engaged. Whilst being hard to get a decent sound out of (strange to play a piano loudly and have a muted soft sound come out), when it rang, boy did it produce the most beautifully unsophisticated but gentle and touching sound. This became our "soft piano" available in return for a small donation to Unicef as part of our Labs range. Which we have received many plaudits for. Christian Henson, on putting this library through it's paces for some years now went on a quest to find the perfect "celeste" pedal piano he could find. His quest ended at Peregrines pianos on the Grays Inn Road in London. Purveyors of fine hand made uprights and grands.

Spitfire built a room around this new piano in our HQ in Kings Cross a perfect environment to record instruments for our "Producer Portfolio" range - dedicated to providing producers, song writers and composers with raw untreated instruments in a neutral space to make their own. This piano has been performed by Mercury Award nominee Gwilym Simcock and has been recorded Joe Rubel and the Spitfire team with a number of rarefied microphones in a number of perspectives via neve pre-amps and Cranesong AD converters at 96k. From the almost vintage sound of a mono sound board mic to a beautiful natural surround perspective of the room itself. Most celeste pedals allow for only one dynamic layer but this piano is more responsive than others so not only did we record several round robins, we recorded 2 dynamic layers, release triggers and round robin pedal damping and releasing.

We think it's the most beautiful "soft" piano out there, this celeste pedal isn't going to come off for a while.

Requires a full version of Kontakt 4.2.4 or Kontakt 5 to run.

{See video at top of page}