Old Busted Granny Piano

The Old Busted Granny Piano captures the heart and soul of an old, run-down upright piano with rickety keys, a few broken strings and many decades of hard use and abuse. Sure, there are plenty of other great upright piano libraries out there, with their shining lacquer and pristine strings, but none of them ever captured the authentic beauty of a cheap, dusty, beat up, rusting, long untuned upright piano. This is the kind of upright you remember from your grandma's house.

We captured 3-4 velocity layers on all keys, with added round-robin variation on the two middle octaves in the mf range.There are actually two independent release trigger samples for every note to better replicate the natural behavior of the instrument as we recorded it. Each note has separate string release samples and key release samples.The “key” release trigger is the soft, distant sounding mechanical wooden “thud” that naturally occurs whenever any key is lifted, even after the resonance has faded. The piano was so old and rickety that you'd have to very slowly releases the sustain pedal or all of the hammers come crashing back down on the strings and occasionally even get stuck there if you lifted your foot too quickly. Over the years, our Old Busted Granny Piano has become a bit of a cult classic, finding its way into an endless roster of soundtracks, trailers, commercials and records.