Moody Pianophone from Black Chai Audio is a combination of a toy piano and toy xylophone sampled with a smartphone microphone.
Black Chai Audio is a regular BPB reader and he reached out to let us know about Moody Pianophone. It’s a wonderful free instrument and a fantastic way to give something back to the community.
While lo-fi instruments might seem like a nightmare to some, lo-fi enthusiasts probably nod in approval and with good reason because the plugin does sound nice!
If you like the sound, you’ll be happy to know that it works on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Check out the cool demo from Black Chai Audio:
The plug-in is equipped with several different parameters like ADSR controls, volume, space, tone, and chorus to take the sampled sounds on a sonic journey.
You can also enable plucked sounds either in solo or in tandem with the toy piano to create interesting layering.
Black Chai Audio has also crafted two pads to give the instrument even more ambience and atmosphere capabilities. These pads are also playable on their own, which gives the instrument more flexibility.
Unsure where to start? Black Chai Audio has included 14 presets to get you in a lot of different ballparks and to inspire further tweaking.
I can see this being used in a wide variety of scenarios. Typical eerie opening in a movie about ghosts and ghouls? You got it. Cutesy melody on top of an indie-rock chorus or perhaps in a commercial for diapers? Yes.
Since the sounds from this instrument are rich in both transient and sustain material with a lot of harmonics, they could easily be fed into a granular engine, a time stretch algorithm or freezing reverbs to create entirely new sound worlds.
If you need even more lo-fi vibes in your production, check out the free Pistachiotone: A Casiotone MT-65 emulations for Kontakt. I have an original MT-65 which is a trusted and surprisingly versatile piece of gear that I just love the sound of.
Unfortunately, it has seen some wear and tear since its golden years. Knowing there’s an emulation floating around is at least mildly soothing!
Black Chai Audio has developed his instrument in the Decent Sampler plugin so it’s free for absolutely everyone. Nice! You do have to download Decent Sampler to use Moody Pianophone, but that’s an easy task.
To get the Decent Sampler, just visit the site here and choose your preferred format. It’s available for both macOS, Windows, and Linux users.
To download Moody Pianophone, just enter any email address and the download (17MB .rar) will be provided to you. The instrument is donationware, so feel free to donate to Black Chai Audio.
Download: Moody Pianophone (FREE – Decent Sampler required)
More:
- Telephone Guitar is a FREE guitar library for Decent Sampler
- Decent Sampler Is A FREE Sampler That Reminds Us Music Is About Sharing
Last Updated on March 14, 2025 by Tomislav Zlatic.
