Andrew Ward has announced the release of 1911 Bechstein Upright, a freely downloadable upright piano sample library for Native Instruments Kontakt and all sample players capable of loading WAV files.
The library captures the sound of a C. Bechstein Model 9 upright piano manufactured in 1911. This is Andrew Ward’s childhood piano which was fully refurbished in 2013 and sampled for the Piano Book website by Patrick Ytting in March 2019. The sampled instrument sounds quite authentic and natural which is a pleasant surprise given that the download is only 432 MB is in size. That’s quite a lightweight package when compared to something like the Piano in 162 by Ivy Audio which takes up over 4 GB of HDD space.
1911 Bechstein Upright is a compact and excellent sounding upright piano library which won’t put too much strain on your computer and won’t break the bank either. what more can you ask for on a pleasant April afternoon? The included NKI patch is only compatible with the full version of NI Kontakt (it will work in demo mode in the free Kontakt Player) but you can use the provided WAV files in almost any sampler instrument on the market. Creating a custom mapping manually in a freeware sampler like Grace shouldn’t be too much trouble at all, especially considering that the library consists of 104 samples in total (which are all neatly labeled, by the way).
If you like the 1911 Bechstein Upright sample library, be sure to check out the other Kontakt freebies featured on Andrew Ward’s website. It is a proper goldmine of piano libraries, covering everything from toy instruments to uprights and concert grand pianos. You’ll also find a music box sample library and some experimental instruments which are sure to inspire your future music endeavors.
1911 Bechstein Upright is available for free download via Piano Book (432 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 instrument patch in NKI format for NI Kontakt, 104 piano samples in 24-bit WAV format).
4 Comments
mineko
onThis needs correction. This beautiful library has to be credited to the right people.
This is not C. Henson’s piano. This piano belongs to Andrew Ward. Yitting contacted Ward in one of Henson’s Youtube video. If you thoroughly read the article on Pianobook, at the bottom it says who the contributor is with his social media links, just below the download link. Also, this piano library was released at the end of March 2019. Where did you find it was in April? There were already a couple of pianos released afterwards.
On a side note, One Small Clue is going on hiatus according to a news post from May 2018. The site will be up for the next 12 months at least so that means if you need the Grace sampler you better download it now because it won’t be available anymore in a month or two.
Tomislav Zlatic
onFixed, thanks for letting me know!
Ikes
onCan anyone please create a .sfz mapping for this piano?
Andrew
onThanks for sharing! In my experiments so far it works great at full volume layered with various bright “well-tuned” pianos as sort of a “Honkey Tonk” sound, or tucked underneath to add fullness via low-mids and imperfect tuning.