Ships Piano³ by Sound Dust Review
As a returning reader, you know that I do see the Sound Dust instruments at a very high character and originality level. See also our review of INFUNDIBULUM#1 and Cloud Viola2. Sound Dust is the brainchild of Pendle Poucher, a Brighton UK based composer, sound designer and lover of funny noises. Today we are looking at Ships Piano³.
Pendle has written, produced and performed soundtracks for every significant UK TV station and much more all over the world. Pendle worked for ten years as sound designer and composer for award-winning theatre company DreamThinkSpeak devising amongst others a 32 channel soundtrack for their radical reworking of Hamlet “The Rest is Silence” in 2012.
Installation
This library requires the full version of Kontakt 5.5.1 or above is expected.
Sound
There are these days many piano libraries available, almost all major brands have been sampled and made available. To prevent repetition producers started to look into new vibes and tones by focusing on felt and mood inspired themed pianos. If you are interested, you can take a look at one of the many reviews: Augmented Piano (UVI), California Keys (Q Up Arts), or Mysterium – Deconstructed Toy Piano (Origins of Audio).
Ships Piano³ reuses the original Sound Dust Ships Piano instrument and combines it with two very excellent sounding temperament pianos.
- School Grand – a binaurally recorded grand piano in an antique stone walled school hall/chapel
- Ships Piano – 4 or 5 notes of velocity, recorded binaurally and re-tuned
- Room Upright – binaurally recorded with three layers of speed, the cunning bit is that she was reversed, fed through high-end reverb and then reversed again
Ships Piano³ includes a Satie-anator which is a sequencer engine, featuring 12 users programmable, key triggered sequencers with 12 tracks per sequence. Switch notes, key, tone, rhythmic pattern and more.
The tone and mood you can generate from this piano are very flexible. With its uniqueness, you receive a very collection of up to three pianos that can be used in parallel or on there own. With the sound design features, you can dial in you can indeed make this is a unique front instrument or use the Ships Piano in the background supporting your track. Very smart done by Pendle to give us such a varied Piano, the library was released in 2016 and nevertheless holds up in today’s market versus the multiple alternatives.
User interface & Usability
An easy to use Interface, as we did see with may libraries, the tail and sample start is on the front page and give you interested sounding pianos.
There are very usable presets that sound excellent and cover an extensive range of needed moods.
A Ships Piano³ Manual Short version is included on one page you can switch to in the Interface, it is on the RTFM page.
Rating: Five out of five stars
Ships Piano³ is an excellent sounding piano or three superb tinkling pianos plus sonic landscapes. This update includes two new ones who do enrich the tone. Like a piano, it is in the top range and when you turn in the effects and start to combine three keyboards included you genuinely have access to different soundscapes.
