The Crow Hill Company’s Vaults collection offers a continual rotation of instruments that are given away for free for a limited time, and then remain available at a small fee once they’ve dropped out of the ‘current’ line-up. The most recent addition to the range has just been turned into a fully fledged member of the company’s product range, and captures a piano being played right on the very edge of silence.
If you’re after a bold, bright piano, then the company suggest you keep looking, as Absurdly Quiet Piano Pro stays true to its name and delivers the very opposite to what's on offer in your average piano library. It captures a piano being played so softly that the hammer barely makes contact with the strings, resulting in an incredibly quiet, intimate sound that’d be near enough impossible to capture live.
While the original Vaults recordings were made by founder Christian Henson in his house, the samples that make up the Pro variant have been captured at Edinburgh's Castlesound studio, and unlike the previous version, cover two dynamics layers — super-soft and almost-silent-soft! Despite the combination of high-quality mics and a controlled recording environment, the quiet performance still left the team with a high noise floor, which required painstaking per-sample noise reduction to avoid the clean-up process negatively impacting the tone of the instrument or introducing unwanted artefacts.
Check out the walkthrough video below to hear the new arrival in action.
Compatibility
Absurdly Quiet Piano Pro is supported on PCs running Windows 10 or above, and Macs running macOS 11 and higher. VST2, VST3, AU and AAX plug-in versions are available.
Pricing & Availability
Absurdly Quiet Piano Pro is available now, priced at £29 including VAT.
