The Crow Hill Company’s recently released Gong Piano offered a refreshing new take on piano libraries, harnessing the power of sampling to create a new, imaginary instrument rather than recreating an acoustic one. Their latest offering takes the same approach, and delivers a virtual piano that, instead of strings, is loaded up with a selection of glassware!
Crystal Pianos has been inspired by the 1974 John Carpenter cult-classic ‘Dark Star’, that features a scene in which an astronaught plays a piano-like instrument where the hammers strike glass vessels rather than strings. Company founder Christian Henson decided to create a similar effect when tasked with scoring a science fiction film back in 2004, and just over two decades later, he believe’s he’s finally achieved it!
The resulting instrument has been created using recordings of 18 different glass objects, with the sampled sources including a variety of beakers, wine glasses and bowls. Each piece was picked for its unique sonic qualities, and the collection delivers tones ranging from celeste-like chimes to a “chorus of shimmering glass”. And thanks to the company’s new Shepherd Mapping technique, all of the samples can be played chromatically.
Each offering provides users with a choice of five different playing styles: Hyper-detailed Hits, Muted Hits, Slow Ripples, Fast Ripples and Rubs. The overall character of each glass piece can be controlled using a ‘partial mixer’, which allows users to tweak individual components of each performance: Fundamentals (the most audible music note or root), Harmonics (the surrounding frequencies mapped chromatically) and Transients (the strike tone).
Key Features
- 18 individually selected pieces of glassware.
- Sampled with multi-mic setup (Neumann KM84, KM184 and U87).
- Three different and individually controllable partials tones.
- Over 30GB of uncompressed audio (compressed losslessly to ~13GB).
- Five Articulations: Standard Hits, Muted Hits, Tremolo Slow, Tremolo Fast, and Rubbed (With Finger on Rim)
- Five Included Effects: LP/HP Filter, Sub Bass Harmonizer, Delay, Reverb and Crystallizer.
Compatibility
Crystal Pianos is supported on PCs running Windows 10 and above, and Macs running macOS 11 or higher. VST2, VST3, AU and AAX plug-in versions are available.
Pricing & Availability
Crystal Pianos is available now, priced at $99£75 including VAT / €85.
