The Grand Mechaniano
Kontakt Version Required:
5.8.1 Full Version (Not for Kontakt Player) - learn more
Product Version: 1
Designed Piano Deviations
Now £34.90
Product Overview
The Grand Mechaniano was based on the sound of a grand piano recorded at a local school of music.
The idea was to effect and alter the samples to expose and emphasize all the "ugliness" the piano would be capable of under certain circumstances (a simulation of bad weather conditions, aging, bad care, various forms of damaging the thing...) The goal was to obtain the sounds with a "different" aesthetic - raw, unpolished, detuned, squeaky, creaky, noisy, gritty, dusty, cracky, lo-fi, warped, overdriven or otherwise sound-designed samples.
These sounds could be mangled together with many other sounds, mostly of a metallic and mechanical nature (hence the name Mechaniano). In pursuit of this plan, a lot of places spanning several years were visited and a lot of various sound sources were recorded and used. For example – fences around the blocks of flats under reconstruction, agricultural machines put away standing in the fields, an abandoned junkyard with construction material after building the highway, steel sculptures in a town park, a circular saw reel, container springs, trash bins, roadblocks, a fridge, rain water rustling in the drainpipes during winter, a little hand bell, an old hand-lever pump, cans, barrels, gears, cups, an elevator, a rusty garden gate but also many weird sounds created in a synthesizer.
Please note: The FULL version of Kontakt 5.8.1 or above is required. Not for Kontakt Player
Manual Available Download now
Categories
Overview
SPECS
- 24 bit / 44,1 kHz wav format
- 1,29 GB installed
- 54 basic patches with original samples
- 155 patches derived from basic ones
- 20 multi patches
- a selection of a grand piano samples, synth, found metals in a 3-layer concept
- Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, EQ, Lo-Fi, Drive, Stereo, Limiter, Volume, Cabinet, Delay, Reverb, Attack, Release, Tuning, Pan, LFO controls
- Kontakt 5.8.1 FULL version needed
3 LAYERS
All this together in a three-layer concept would provide us with a wonderfully surreal instrument sharing the piano "nature" with more or less weird additional "flavours", or "colours" if you will. That means hopefully an instrument which you will not find anywhere else, which would be utilized in some special composing situations - but a traditional piano would not work.
Strange ambiences, suspense and horror atmospheres, crime and alien scenes, abandoned buildings, dungeons, prisons, asylums, strange mechanisms, unidentified threats, but also melancholic scenes of old times, long forgotten memories, intimate moments with the close ones, feelings of love, fear and loss... Or simply - you just create something unique and indescribable and for that you need a unique instrument.
Or perhaps you might feel frustrated, or caught "in a composer´s block" and in need of "something different", which would inspire and "restart" you. This library will be handy in all of the above mentioned situations. The Grand Mechaniano surely is not for everyone. It is not a polished piano library to compose classical pieces with. Instead, it will take you off the main piano roads and enable exploring the "dark side" of the black and white keys.
HOW IT WAS MADE
TGM is not a traditional piano, as you know by now. Not a deep sampled, wide octave range sound set, but rather a selection of adjusted piano tones coupled with other sounds of a (mostly) metallic or effect/synth nature. There are mostly short length samples (many with a nice sustain), but no pads, or looped, evolving soundscapes. Anyway, the library contains many patches, that can produce similarly sounding results (especially, if the "tuning" knobs are turned left, which means the pitch is lowered and the sample prolonged). The main strength of the library is a wide range of variously "crippled" pianolike sounds.
Thanks to various pre-adjustment of the piano samples (effecting, warping, detuning etc...) and additional obscure sounds triggered at the same time, the Grand Mechaniano becomes an instrument with many different sound colours and flavours.
TGM uses a 3 layer concept - the middle layer being the piano sample, the left mostly some kind of a metallic sound, the right one mostly something piano/fx like made up in a synthesizer. Each combination of layers contains different samples (although some of the patches can contain the same metallic sounds in nature but different sample of that particular sound - there are just a few such instances, when I liked more than one combination with the actual sound). Anyway, there are 54 original patches (or 3-layer sound combinations) and every one of them will take you a different sound route.
PATCHES
The Grand Mechaniano contains 54 original sound designed patches in the "Basic" subfolder of the "Instruments" folder. Load and explore these patches, alter them and save the results in the "User" folder to store them safely, preserving the original patches intact.
In the "Derived" folder you will find 155 additional patches derived from the patches of the Basic category. These can immediately find a place in your production, or again - serve as a starting point for altering them to your liking.
Note - the Derived patches names are starting with the number, which tells you from which basic ones they were derived.
Then you will find another 20 multi patches in the "Multi" folder – these are combinations of more than one patch, giving you even more sound designs to use immediately. Every patch has a unique name, which loosely associates with the character of its sample set, or describes loosely what it sounds like to help you choose the right one to work with. Have fun exploring and creating!