Laid Back Piano

Laid Back Piano delivers the sounds of a very old and totally rotten upright piano relic. Excavated from a deserted backyard building in a Dresden suburb, this piano surely had seen better days in its life. All that was left was the housing and 90 percent of the strings.
Even its feet were missing - the piano had to be laid down in the studio. Thanks to the missing keyboard and front panel, the piano produced a fascinating, undamped reverb sound, which evolved each time a string was touched.

For this ReFill, every single string was recorded separately from a number of
different microphone positions. Three of the included Combinators represent
carefully tuned piano presets (Piano, Piano Distance, Tiny Piano). For another
set of combinators, a lot of prepared piano techniques were applied, like the
sound of the strings with printer paper clamped in-between, attached plastic
tools, pillow-damped plucking, and more.

Additionally six Combinators with untuned one-shots and atonal loops are
included in the Refill. These sounds were achieved by methods such as throwing
a variety of items into the piano housing, stroking a thumb´s nail along the
lower strings, and more. Furthermore, each person that came along during the
3-day recording session was invited to strike and knock on the piano body in
order to end up with a collection of suspenseful “Percussion” sounds.

On a final note: two weeks after finding this piano, the building where we
found burned down to the ground. So these sounds were saved in the true sense
of the word!

ReFill Specifications

• 13 Combinator Patches
• Combinator Controls: Brightness, Delay, Reverb, Volume
• Combinator Switches: EQ Boost, Chorus, Delay Mode, Compression
• 612 Samples (24 Bit, 44.1 kHz)
• 1.1 GB Sample content
• 570 MB Refill content