I feel you on that, I do the same when I have something free that later became paid. Thankfully I don’t feel left out here because I have a Wurli in my V Collection 7. My Komplete 13 probably has a thing or two for that as well.

Spitfire Audio has put out some seriously great stuff though, they’re one of my favorites for sampled instruments and have a huge free library that’s also very unique and has a lot of personality. I kind of miss the old format of trailers and whatnot for their monthly free LABS releases, but this is cool too.

Personally i felt there was too much low-mid build-up in general. I could be wrong, but my guess is that this is due to each key being sampled separately (duh), hence when multiple keys are played, the recorded body resonance of the piano gets stacked multiple times & over-emphasized.

It’s lovely, indeed! Enjoy.

Cheers!

I agree, many LABS releases are quite niche, but as a collection, it’s awesome, and sometimes the unexpected ones turn out to be gems.

This piano is great, I hope you get a lot of use out of it, cheers, Mathew.

One thing that surprised me is that the dynamic range is EXCELLENT. Usually with small sample libraries they sacrifice the dynamics between layers and you have abrupt volume changes for slightly harder hits on the keyboard. This library doesn’t have that problem at all and can be very soft or in your face.

To anyone who wants to use this piano for practice or brighten up the sound for a mix, I would highly recommend a high shelf EQ boost at around 12Hz of 8-10 dB, a very wide high freq bell boost (low q) at 4kHz of 5 dB, a small, high q (notch) style bell cut at 306kHz (try 2 or 3 dB cut) to remove some overtone buildup that exists within the recorded samples, and some parallel compression (4:1 ratio, 40ms attack, .1 second release, 1 or 2 dB knee, 50% stereo link, get 3-4 dB of gain reduction and then 50% compression mix) to really level out the low and high frequency differences in the instrument.

(I did all of this on the Fuse Audio Labs VCS-1 Channel Strip)

This is a must have library in my opinion.

Thanks for the post BPB!

Well, I thought that commercial version already existed at the time the free one was released. I may be wrong, though. Anyways, I zipped it and backed it up. That will hopefully do.

Unfortunately it looks like Spitfire turned it into a paid instrument. It’s only $29 though so it’s not overpriced imo.

Alright I just used this in one of a 2hu jazz arrange and gosh its so lovely!!!!
Definitely best piano they have so far imo!

Thanks James Nugent and BPB! We appreciate the quick updates.