Five Kontakt Player instruments are included with the latest Soniccouture release, Xtended Piano. With this “extended” collection, Soniccouture used some unorthodox techniques to play a piano in unusual ways, in similar fashion to what John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Stephen Scott would have done.
The Xtended Piano suite of instruments includes Kontakt Player pianos that reflect five different playing techniques — Mute Piano, Plucked Piano, Mallet Piano, Bowed Piano, and SFX Piano.
Mute Piano features a technique in which you lightly touch the finger at a nodal point on the piano string and play the key to produce a harmonic. In Soniccouture’s Mute Piano instrument, this harmonic is the 3rd harmonic, so it sounds a 12th above the fundamental (an octave plus a fifth); this is the harmonic most used by George Crumb, who often included muted piano is his pieces. It’s also one of the few easily produced harmonics that you can reach while still being able to play the keys. Using the custom KSP scripting, you can opt to have the keyboard play either the notes you would expect, or the harmonic produced.
With the Plucked Piano instrument, the piano notes are plucked, either with the fingers or a plectrum of some sort. For this release, Soniccouture used a guitar pick and recorded plucked notes with both the piano dampers down and up. The picked sound is said to be clean and pure with a harpsichord-like sound. The Plucked Piano also includes a bonus Hybrid Instrument called the Plucksichord, which features the plucked guitar undamped samples with the key-off samples from Mute Piano.
Mallet Piano features the strange timbres produced when the piano strings were struck with foreign mallets (wooden and marimba). The wooden mallet has a timbre reminiscent reminiscent of honky-tonk or “thumb tack” pianos, like those used in ragtime music.
The Bowed Piano instrument features the strings of the piano bowed with fishing line and horsehair to produce both sustained and short notes. It includes three articulations, two made with very long bows that are sustained (and the samples are looped). Bowed Piano happens to be the same sample set from the company’s Bowed Piano product.
Lastly, SFX Piano contains strums, scrapes, percussive noises, and other soundscapes created from the guts of the piano. A total of 127 different strums and scrapes included, one for every MIDI note, along with a KSP “key-shuffle” function to re-sort the key-mapping for creative composition and performance.
Xtended Piano features:
- 6 GB sample library, or 3.5 GB with NCW (Kontakt Lossless Sample compression)
- 24-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo sampling – 2,829 samples in all
- 5 Individual Kontakt Instruments: Mute Piano, Plucked Piano, Mallet Piano, Bowed Piano, SFX Piano
- Multiple Key-switched articulations, key-off samples, velocity layers alternated with round robin samples for a natural response
- 40 Sound-design presets
- Full custom control interface with Synth, Performance, and Effects Panels
- Soniccouture KSP performance modules: Glissando, Strummer, Jammer
- Includes the Bowed Piano sample set
Soniccouture’s Xtended Piano collection is now available for 99 EUR (approximately $127). Through October 1st, you can get 15 percent off the list price by applying promo code 0EKR5R1HTT at checkout.