The Backstory
In 2018 I was searching for a new grand piano, and wanted to quickly understand the character of many prestigious piano brands. To do this, I turned to youtube and digested as many video comparisons as possible to finally settle on my Mason & Hamlin Model A. Since then, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have access to multiple pianos from different manufacturers, all recorded similarly so they could be compared? Furthermore, wouldn’t it be great to have digital versions of these world class pianos to perform and record with?
And so my sampling journey began. I started with my own piano, practicing the recording and editing technique, as well as coding more and more complicated features.
- Damper resonance recordings – check!
- Continuous Velocity Scaling – check!
- Half pedaling and Repedaling – check!
- Advanced mixing controls – check!
- Sympathetic resonance – check!
All of these incremental recording and coding challenges have culminated in a collection of piano libraries that I can now present to you. I can now safely say that the Experience Pianos now contain similar features to other commercial libraries at a fraction of the cost.
The Present and Future….
The Experience Pianos have been featured on Pianobook, an online community of samplists who publish free virtual instruments. As of December 2023, three of the top five piano libraries are The Experience Pianos, including the New York S&S Model B, Fazioli F308, and Yamaha S6. These three libraries have been both renamed and improved for sale on this site with Gumroad link. If you would like to get a sense of the quality of The Experience Piano libraries, please download these absolutely free versions from Pianobook.
In creating this website, I paid a fair bit of attention to the information provided as I take it very seriously. One thing that really irks me are the superlatives, exaggerations, and outright misinformation that some piano library developers use to sell more libraries. You won’t see that here as I truly mean everything that I write. If you have any questions, I will try to be up front and honest about the capabilities of the pianos and fix issues as they arise as best I can.
After all of the recording and programming that I’ve done, I’m still not finished. I have other pianos lined up for the future, so expect to see more as time goes by.