How to Sample a Piano using KONTAKT!

In this video I am showing my experience sampling my own Acoustic Piano and making it into an instrument inside Kontakt! This was my first time ever sampling a piano and I learned many different things through the process that id like to share with everyone!
For Kontakt I used a script created by David Hilowitz and Angus-roberts Carey (ARC Samples). The link to the script I mentioned in the video can be found on David's orginal video for creating a Kontakt piano template, just click the link and it will take you to his video where you can download it!
Link to David Hilowitz's video : • I've made a Kontakt pi...
To be clear, my intention is only to share the information I have learned and present it from my perspective while also giving credit where credit it is due!
Thank you David and Angus-Robert Carey for your all your hard work scripting:)
Timescodes
0:00 Recording the Piano
2:53 Editing the Samples
6:02 Cubase/Nuendo Naming tips
7:41 Putting sounds into Kontakt
15:04 Sample and Recording AB

[@MrJuju515]

Dude that is absolutely incredible!

[@ArcitecAudio]

Thanks! so much! i actually should post a binaural piano i just finished making a while back. I recorded it and made a vst for it where you can use a bunch of other mic positions. Ill look into doing that soon then!

[@VVeedragon]

That's crazy dude, I didn't know you could do that :o

[@charlesyuen7071]

sounds awesome bro, love it

[@ArcitecAudio]

Thanks Charles! Ill look into posting a video with a link to this binaural piano i just made a while back. It still needs some tweaking but nonetheless it could be cool for anyone looking to learn how to create an instrument using multiple mic positions!

[@charlesyuen7071]

@@ArcitecAudio Pure passion! Keep doing it, Looking forward to hear those binaural samples!

[@64nightfly]

Thank you for posting this insightful video. I owned a Yamaha U3 and it one of the best uprights on the market in my opinion; the 52" height increases the string length and soundboard size just enough to give enormous sound improvements in the tenor and bass sections, especially (compared to the 48" U1, for example). Moving the piano away from the wall several feet and placing some mics on the backside (experiment with different distances) will help to reduce unwanted sounds from the action and will allow unobstructed access to the soundboard. It also dramatically changes the acoustical reflections in the room and, in my case, made the piano sound much better overall. Too bad I didn't figure that out until I was moving and selling the piano! You can mix in mics from the frontside as well as needed. You might also consider trying some ribbon mics, if the sound is too bright, as Yamahas tend to be, depending on the voicing of the hammers, etc. Good luck and have fun (even though it is extremely tedious work)!

[@ArcitecAudio]

Thanks for this comment; I really adore this piano its been with me for over 18 years! I actually moved the piano near my staircase for the reason reason you just mentioned, it sounds much better there! I really would love to close mic a some stereo coles 4038's and combine them with some other condensers a little further away. I did this mic combo at Humber studios for some recordings a while back and it really captured the low and mid nicely but because of the ribbon it attenuated much of the hammer\mechanical noise from close mic a piano, combined and mixed, you get the nice detail of the condenser far enough to avoid the mechanical noise but then have the ribbons close to bring out and enhance the low and mids of the piano. My preference is generally for warmer sounding pianos which are a little less bright so this setup worked for me!

[@64nightfly]

@@ArcitecAudio Wonderful! You might also consider a Blumlein pair (condenser or ribbon), depending on how much you like binaural. I have not tried Blumlein yet but plan to experiment with a pair of AKG 414's. Have you tried SampleRobot? I am temped to try it. Pricey, but seems to potentially automate the sampling workflow in a very time-saving way. I can see how it would be a big time saver with synths (especially ones with MIDI), but I was wondering about acoustics instruments.

[@ArcitecAudio]

@@64nightfly I havent done the blumlein technique yet on a piano but i have actually sampled a piano using the binaural ku-100 along with some coles, 149s and some km184s its was my best piano sampling; will post it up one day with a link to download it, maybe on piano book and my website. I have not tried sample robot, will look into this for sure, any time saver in sampling is good!

[@Dave-nm8uk]

Presumably the sections around 15:26 - 15:37 are to show the differences - if any - between the original piano sound and the sampled sound. It is quite easy to tell the difference, though some may like the fact that the samples have taken the twang out of the original. Very interesting - thank you . I often wonder whether it's really necessary to use expensive microphones for this kind of exercise. I used a simple mic to make a quick version of our own piano using the Logic sampler. It's not great, but it took hardly any time to do. I do not know how to export a virtual instrument easily from the Logic sampler to other virtual instrument systems. Probably if I wanted to do so I could generate a virtual instrument with some effort and (say) Decent Sampler, but that would be a lot slower than just using the Sampler in Logic directly and would only be worthwhile if I wanted to use the virtual instrument in different software systems.

[@ArcitecAudio]

The differences are quite noticable yes and in general i would say more expensive microphones = better result up to a certain point. Its also the depth of your sample layers which makes a convincing sample, with pianos its mostly in the in the velocity layers! To get a decent sounding sample, better than this recording youve got to spend around 3hrs just doing all your layers, after that processing is not that fun either:) Im not too familiar with the Logic sampler so Im afraid i cant be of much help here! With regards to your sampler of choice, I would recommend Decent sampler or Kontakt as you can use these with other DAWS, but if your a logic die hard then i think the ease of sampling outweights the effort needed in making your sample versatile across multiple DAWs

[@davedaltonworship]

Is this library available for sale or download? Thanks for sharing!

[@ArcitecAudio]

I dont have a download for this specific one available at the moment:( , however this year i will be making a video or two showing my experience creating a vst for Kontakt which will be downloadable. It will be a piano vst that will be sampled Binaurally with the KU-100 along with a bunch of other mics. Ive already done this before with less velocity samples but havent posted a video on it yet. Ive been so busy with my new job that You Tube has fallen by the wayside. When im a bit more stable i intend to get some stuff up!

[@KellBailey]

How did you learn how to do this?

[@ArcitecAudio]

Its been a while, but I started with this "How To Build A Piano Instrument In KONTAKT" and then just figured out the sample amount I wanted to do and then figured some out myself and also used other resources like David Hilowitz to learn a bit more about kontakt. Its not too hard to do but to get a good result on piano you need lots of sample velocity layers. Hope that steers you in the right direction:)

[@KellBailey]

@@ArcitecAudio I'm shooting my shot here but i would be interested in you helping me create a piano instrument with real piano samples like this for a project im working on for 2024. If this is something you are interested in send me your email i would love to give you more details. Compensation would be involved btw. Let me know.

[@ArcitecAudio]

Yeah sure let me know the details! If you got to bottom of my website, my email is right there www.arcitecaudio.com/ @@KellBailey ..i would hyperlink the website in the comments if i knew how

[@KellBailey]

@@ArcitecAudio Sent! i look forward to hearing from you!

[@jonos138]

Why do the sample sounds from your completed piano sound so wooly compared to the sound of your real piano? It doesn't sound as clean as your original piano, it sounds more like a felt piano now. All the top end is gone and it's all muffled sounding.

[@ArcitecAudio]

So there are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that the De- noising process for the samples removes a lot of the treble, in my case I had to remove more noise because I didnt have high quality mics and preamps to record with. Another reason is that I used the practice pedal(felt piano) so that also made it sound muffled. Ive had oppourtunities to record with higher quality mics/signal chains and imo they make all of the difference in terms of quality. Of course I nice piano generally helps too:)

[@jonos138]

@@ArcitecAudio Thanks for the explanation. I can now understand the difficulties you had in recording the samples and removing noise. It's a long laborious process recording samples.

[@ArcitecAudio]

@@jonos138 With better mics and you dont have to do as much noise removal and it sounds much better!