Nocturne Electric Piano

Introducing Nocturne Electric Piano, the second addition to our no-frills, great-sounding, easy-to-use Select series which premiered with the release of Emma Legato earlier this year.

Whether you're composing emotive, soulful compositions, cinematic scores, sparse arrangements, or poignant song intros, Nocturne Electric Piano offers a special, mellow, dreamy, and intimate sound that feels incredibly inspiring to play.

Nocturne was born from a personal story...

Last year, we stumbled across a beautiful mid-70s Hohner Model M electric piano – an instrument that didn't sound quite like a Rhodes or a Wurlitzer, but had its own mellow, intimate, and cinematic voice. It was love at first play. Regretfully, after a week of intense use, the piano's circuitry failed and it caught fire! Thankfully our studio was largely undamaged but we had lost our beloved 'new' instrument. The sound and spirit of that piano stayed with us...

Determined to bring it back to life, we found a studio with a similar model and deep-sampled it in incredible detail. We captured the full character and vibe of that magical instrument, and Nocturne Electric Piano was born.

To give you total creative control, we recorded four distinct signals:

• DI Output – the cleanest, purest signal.
• Guitar Amp – for adding warmth and vintage colour.
• Mechanical Noise – a stereo capture of the tactile, acoustic sounds from the keys and tines.
• Tape Echo Reverb – a mono reverb captured through an old Tape Echo with an extra old and dirty tape cartridge in it, for that special, nostalgic vibe.

In true Select series spirit, Nocturne keeps things simple, but it does have a couple of tricks up its sleeve. Our favourite is the Double Track switch – a one-click way to create a beautiful, organic stereo image by using different round robins on the left and right channels. It brings out the imperfect beauty of what is a very mechanical instrument where every note played has tiny variations.

We've also included our signature atmospheric FX, tweaked specially for this piano:

• White Cloud – a lush studio reverb.
• Blue Atmos – a shimmering, with diffused ambience with a huge tail.
• Pink Atmos – a slowly modulated reverb with some granular-like processing, using DSP from Native Instruments' Raum reverb.

Nocturne Electric Piano also includes a range of bus processing presets and 25 curated presets to help get you started.

Nocturne Electric Piano works with the free Kontakt Player 8.1 (available for download here).