Spitfire Audio Château Piano

Lovingly restored, and then lovingly sampled, Spitfire’s Château Piano recreates a pop icon.

When you play Heardle for long enough — the game which challenges you to guess the song by listening to tiny sections of it — you begin to realise that the sound of an iconic artist is often instantly recognisable, even if you don’t know their entire catalogue very well. That’s how I ended up correctly guessing several Elton John deep cuts, just from the sound of his piano. In their new release Château Piano, Spitfire Audio bottle up that distinctive sound and bring it to your DAW in a remarkably light (19GB) sample library that runs in Spitfire’s Ensemble plug‑in.

The château in the title refers to Château d’Hérouville aka Strawberry Studios, considered to be the world’s first residential recording studio, and the piano is the 1901 Steinway B grand that resides in the château. Before the studio closed in 1985, Elton John was not the only artist making career‑defining records there; fellow legends David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, the Bee Gees, Jethro Tull, and many others walked through its doors, sat at the Steinway in the George Sand live room, and conjured up the sound of rock and pop history.

In 2015, sound engineers and musicians Jean Taxis and Thierry Garacino bought the château and began the painstaking task of renovating the space and restoring the piano. In the hands of master tuner Bastien Herbin, the restoration aimed to bring the piano back to life “while preserving its personality”. The team at Spitfire Audio took on the task of sampling the piano and keeping the sound as authentic as possible.

In The Box

Sound and playability are the primary metrics that influence the decision to purchase a sample library, and with Château Piano’s source material so steeped in history, the sound of the instrument is definitely the key draw. The Spitfire team have gone to great lengths to capture the sonic essence of the instrument using a collection of valve and capacitor microphones, including, the literature tells us, “a pair of vintage Neumann U67s in the same positioning as [on] the original Elton John recordings”.

Great attention was paid to recreating authentic mic setups from the records associated with Château d’Hérouville.

The piano has been captured with five dynamic layers and three round robins per note (pedal up and pedal down), except in the lowest range (A0‑A#1) and highest range (C7‑C8), which have two round robins. Samples are grouped into six categories: from the bare‑bones Natural to the heavily processed Effected presets.

The library offers eight signals in total: Close, which captures the direct sound of the piano strings; Super Close, which has microphones placed near the hammers; Room, a stereo signal which captures the acoustics of the George Sand live room; processed signals like Tape, Compressed, Chorus and Distorted to add warmth, punch, shimmer and grit to the sound; and, finally, Mix, a fully produced signal, ready to be dropped into your compositions.

A point to note is that each of the 37 presets loads with a predetermined combination of three signals from the ones listed above. Within the three signals on offer, you’re free to mix things around to get a sound of your liking, but you can’t, for example, substitute a Room signal for Tape if a Tape signal is not already assigned to the preset. Reverb is also baked in, lending each preset its own character; you then have the option to dial in the amount of reverb needed, or turn it off entirely, if you prefer.

Straight out of the box, the piano has a distinctly bright sound, well suited for pop and rock compositions and all the better for cutting through a mix. The bold sound draws attention to itself, which immediately sets the composer up for the kind of arrangement where the piano takes centre stage. That said, when you go through all the patches on offer, it becomes clear that Château Piano is actually a rather versatile library and the classic, character‑filled core sound is only a starting point. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Intimate category, which provides more than enough shades of a softer sound for those whose style leans in a mellower direction. You can make it even darker by dropping an EQ on your effects rack; the samples are so well recorded, they stand up to post‑processing. Perfect for songwriters in a pensive mood, and media composers who have to write underscores that play well with dialogue.

Effects

The experimental among us who love a good effects stack will appreciate the Lush, Driven and Effected presets. Lush, as the name suggests, puts the samples through processing to bring you wide, ambient and spacious textures. Long plate, stadium and ambient reverb combined with Chorus and Tape signals create dreamy soundscapes which add weightlessness and air to the otherwise naturally percussive, solid quality of a piano sound. The Driven presets bring added punch and warmth, perfect for an operatic rock ballad. The Effected presets let you go fully experimental with their combination of tape, chorus, distortion, non‑linear reverb and compression in varying intensities. This range is what makes the library versatile: you can play a classical‑sounding, follow‑the‑rules piece with the Natural Concertino patch one day and switch to an avant‑garde composition the next, all using the same sample library.

Playability

Château Piano is expressive and playable in that it runs smoothly and performance isn’t interrupted by glitches and dropouts. Presets load without lag and there are no random surprises like badly resonating stray notes or messy clicks and pops. There are also plenty of opportunities to shape the sound to your liking by making adjustments to effects parameters, mixing the three mic signals, and modifying dynamics.

An old‑school instrument combined with technological tools brings this piece of history into the modern world and makes it an enjoyable library to experiment with.

The sound of the samples is consistent across the entire range of the piano: low notes are powerful and clean; high notes, delicate and sparkling. It will be a long time before you run out of ideas to bring to life across the various tones available in the library. You also don’t really need to mess with individual note velocity to make it sound uniform. The library doesn’t offer the ability to tweak individual notes in the GUI, so if you do want to change things around, you’ll have to do it in your DAW’s editing window.

The library also does not offer the ability to adjust velocity curves within its interface, but you can modify that in your MIDI controller software to ensure you are making full use of the dynamic range of the samples. Connecting the touch of your performance to the responsiveness of the samples makes all the difference in whether you enjoy using the library so it’s worth the extra effort to get it right. Here’s a great SOS article to get you started, if you’re new to this: https://sosm.ag/midi-velocity

On that note, let’s pause for a second to explore how Spitfire’s Expression and Dynamics sliders work in this library, because the GUI (and the manual) is a little opaque about these important tools. Dynamics (slider number two on the interface, assigned to the mod wheel by default) adjusts dynamic range, which you can increase or decrease using the slider. Counterintuitively, pulling the slider down increases the dynamic variation available to you — when the slider is at zero percent, both the quietest and loudest dynamic layers are available for use. When the slider is at 100 percent, only the loudest dynamic layers are triggered. Once you hear it in action, it becomes easier to understand, but it’s worth noting that you should adjust the settings before you play. Slider number one controls Expression, which the manual says, “adjusts the level of technique”. To my ears, in this library, it adjusts volume. Using both Expression and Dynamics is useful in making a passage breathe and sound less programmed.

Château Piano is a sample library, not a physically modelled instrument, so you are limited by the sound of the actual recordings, but using the word ‘limited’ in this case seems a bit harsh. The sounds are nuanced and flexible, with plenty of parameters to modify and make them your own. People have criticised piano sample libraries for not focusing enough on pedal behaviour and Château Piano seems to address that somewhat — while there is no una corda patch, there are pedal up and pedal down options per note and that will have to do.

If you are a fan of the golden era of pop and rock that this piano evokes, this library is the next best thing to actually travelling to the now reopened studio.

Conclusion

At £129$159, the library isn’t cheap by any means, and perhaps the ability to go under the hood for a few more parameters like release sample level, note velocity, pedalling and so on might make this a more attractive offering for more experienced performers. Overall, if you are a fan of the golden era of pop and rock that this piano evokes, this library is the next best thing to actually travelling to the now reopened studio to record in the hallowed rooms which may or may not host the ghost of Chopin or George Sand, as recounted by David Bowie, Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Château Piano’s character‑filled sound and versatility makes it a useful addition to a composer’s piano sample library collection.