Jerry’s Pianos is a brand new free piano sample library released by Cinesamples, containing over 1 GB of high quality orchestral grand piano samples for Native Instruments Kontakt.
The library captures the sound of two grand pianos that were recorded at the Sony Scoring Stage, playing in unison. According to the official description provided by Cinesamples, their goal with Jerry’s Pianos was to create a deeply sampled grand piano virtual instrument that would be suitable for use in modern cinematic orchestral music. They wanted to capture that specific percussive grand piano sound that is often used for adding rhythm and dynamics to orchestral pieces.
See also: Free Acoustic Piano Sample Libraries!Jerry’s Pianos contains staccato and sustain samples, although it’s important to note that the sustains are also fairly short (the library doesn’t include full sustain samples with natural fade outs). Note length is controlled via the modulation wheel. The main focus is on the lower end of the spectrum, with the highest sampled note being C#2. The customized Kontakt interface provides direct control over several sound engine parameters, including the amplitude envelope and the FX section consisting of saturation, punch and reverb effects. Also available is a very interesting ensemble mode, which can simulate up to six pianos playing in unison by layering different round robin samples.
Obviously, Jerry’s Pianos is a library that is highly optimized for a very specific style of playing, so it won’t be very useful for more subtle piano music. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a grand piano library that you’d use to compose an epic action movie soundtrack, you’ve pretty much found the perfect pick! The library will work for fifteen minutes in Kontakt Player, so you’ll need the full version of Kontakt in order to use it without a time limit. On the other hand, if you don’t mind mapping your own patches, you can use the provided WAV files in pretty much any sampler instrument on the market.
A valid email address is required in order to download the sample library. Mailing list subscription is completely optional. The downloaded ZIP archive contains an EXE installer which simply extracts all of the required data into a local directory specified by the user.
Video Demo
Check out the Jerry’s Pianos demo video:
Download
Jerry’s Pianos is available for free download via Cinesamples (521 MB download size, ZIP archive containing EXE installer, 1 instrument patch in NKI format for NI Kontakt, 870 audio samples in stereo 24-bit WAV format).
Last Updated on December 19, 2015 by Tomislav Zlatic.
