From the days of living with my parents and not being able to play our living room piano at 3am (I made a lot of music in those hours), to living in apartments with my wife, surrounded by neighbors, I just haven’t had access to a physical piano at the hours when I’m typically working on music. I can't wait to own a piano some day. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) until then, a piano sample library seems to be the samplist's equivalent of a horror film to a beginning director. Inexpensive to make, incredible when done properly, and a very saturated market. There is no shortage of options when it comes to piano Kontakt libraries or VSTs.
Before I get to the free recommendation, I do want to go over some popular paid options that I own and have used regularly throughout the years. One might think that the wealth of options available now would be a bad thing, but really it just means you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for if you dig around enough. Nearly every sample library company has an upright piano for sale.
My go-to for the longest time was Native Instruments’ Una Corda piano, which is still a wonderful library.
Una Corda was a revelation for me when I found it. There are a couple different fabric effects patches, and a lot of customization options for the mechanical sounds of the piano and the player moving on the bench and breathing in the room. On top of that there are interesting background noise settings, tape effects, compression, and a lot of smaller tweakable parameters. Overall it has a wide range of character to go along with the actual piano aspect of the library. The $149 price tag is steep, but Native regularly runs sales on their libraries and Una Corda can certainly be purchased for less than that from time to time. Funny enough, I still use this library all the time but I don’t use the piano sounds of this library anymore. Instead, I take those mechanical sounds and layer them on top of the sounds of a different piano. No other library has the detailed mechanical sounds that this one has, so even if you buy it and move on to something else you could still make regular use of those aspects of this library. It’s great, just expensive.
After I used Una Corda, I switched to the Spitfire Audio Olafur Arnalds Toolkit grand piano.
As much as I love the sound of this piano, I would honestly not recommend this library if you're considering it at full price. Coming in at $299 it’s quite expensive for what it is. There are some other interesting pad and layered sounds as a part of the toolkit, but for $299 it simply is not worth it. That said, similar to Native Instruments, Spitfire regularly runs sales on select libraries and even categories of libraries (such as a percentage off all pianos), and they always run Summer and Black Friday sales across their whole product line. If you could get the Olafur Arnalds Toolkit for 50% off, I would say it might be worth it. It’s truly a beautiful sounding library if you like pianos a little on the darker side. This piano is the main piano I used for my Small Beginnings EP, so if you want to hear a lot of it in action definitely check that out. Even though I don’t recommend it, I use it just because I have it. I’ve become really familiar with it over time and I like it. I’m also just a big fan of Olafur Arnalds, but with all of the other options on the market I wouldn’t go for it.
If you want a great piano sound for free, I cannot recommend Westwood Instruments’ Alt Piano Lite enough.
Alt Piano Lite is the free version of Westwood’s Alt Piano library. The full version comes in at $59, which is also an incredible deal for what that library has to offer. Alt Piano has a lot of character and personality, it was captured beautifully, and If you’re just trying to get something usable for free then Alt Piano Lite will absolutely get the job done.
If you have the $59 to step up to the full version, you’ll get a lot of different designed layered sounds to add in with this piano, which can make for some really cool sound design capabilities. Westwood also has one of the best user interfaces on the market. (I don’t know if that’s a factor for you but it definitely gives them points in my book.) If you want to jump up a bit more to $139, they have a piano library called Lost Piano that has parameters and sounds galore, and even a randomize button that randomizes every parameter in the library. I could sit and play with it for days. Saving the patches, exploring the sounds, and then randomizing into my next adventure. They have one for Synthesizer and Guitar as well, and a bundle to get all three at a reduced price.
Hopefully this helps you pick out a library. I’m sure this will not be the last piano roundup post I’ll ever write, but I wanted to kick things off with some of the popular options and a truly great free library.
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