Subliminal Keys

Unconventional Keys

Subliminal Keys is built as a sound creation studio allowing you to mix up to 4 polyphonic sources at the same time.

This mixing is done both by adjusting the volume of each source and by interweaving their harmonic content. The concept is always to propose an approach based on experimentation and the pleasure of playing with sound. Subliminal Keys is much more than a sound bank dedicated to pianos, realism is not its objective. It is a real invitation to manipulate recognizable and unrecognizable sounds while keeping an essential ease of use.

Subliminal Keys was born out of a fortuitous experiment

During a creative exchange with our friend James Yates from Majetone, he generously offered to give us some samples captured somewhere in a piano museum in Hungary in 2014.

Far from being a collection of the greatest pianos of all time, these few samples arrived in our email box with a nice little note: "go wild!"
This was the basis for the work of Subliminal Keys.

Distorted samples of strange pianos, a few haphazard notes recorded in a place James himself no longer remembers. It's a dream for sound design work: you have the sound but you can't determine the exact context, so the final instrument will have to create this missing context.

The other instrument fragments follow this founding principle: a dive into 20 years of archived recordings on old hard disks, old tapes from the 90s, wild recording sessions on 8mm video tapes...

The context is lost, forgotten: let's recreate it.

Built upon the Stigmata Engine

The Stigmata Engine incorporates four polyphonic sources that reproduce layering techniques, each with sufficient controls to place them in space, adjust their character and modulate them dynamically and continuously.

The organisation of the instrument is simple: there are five categories of controls. Modulations allow you to determine the strength and speed with which sounds are modified. Variations offer alterations to each source in real time. Modulations and Variations work with Macros, grouped controls, while the middle section houses a set of filters combined around a common control, stereo width adjustment and infinite sustain to hold notes played without the need to keep your hands on the keyboard.

Simple and effective but not simplistic.