Noiseash Tools was founded in 2014 by producer, mixing engineer, songwriter, software developer and sound designer Beyhan Kilic. The focus of Noiseash Tools is to develop Logic Pro X DAW Templates for different styles of music, like EDM, Soundtrack, Rock, and many more. The first sample instrument by Noiseash Tools is Epic Piano – let’s take a look.
What is Epic Piano?
Epic Piano is a sample based library of the Yamaha C3 Grand Piano for Native Instruments Kontakt 5. It has been sampled with several mics through vintage tube preamps, tape, and EQ gear to capture every single facet of the sound. According to Noiseash Tools, due to the pre-mixed mastered samples; one will need not to do much to make it sound rich and on par with a pro record.
Features Overview
- 24 bit, High-End Premium quality (1.8 GB, Over 5,000!) samples from a Yamaha C3 Grand Piano.
- Samples are recorded with several mics through vintage tube preamp, tape and EQ gear, pre-mixed and mastered.
- Fully Customisable User Controls. (3 Special Mixer Channels, Kontakt’s Internal Fx units: 9 Reverb IR’s, SSL EQ and Delay FX Units). Sustain Volume and Release time faders for Advanced Automations.
- Including 3 piano (and 1 FX) instruments for any kind of music genres.
- Available for only digital download.
- Full Retail version of Kontakt 5.1 or later required.
2 GB harddrive space. - Price Tag: $49.00.
Installation
After purchase, you will be able to download the installation file. Once unzipped, open your file browser in Kontakt and load your patch of choice from the “Instruments” folder. As this library needs the full retail version of Kontakt, it will not appear in the “libraries” tab pane. However, it can be added to the “Quick Load” menu.
Sound
There are already tons of piano sample libraries out there, and I have several – some with tons of GB of samples, others with only a few hundred. However, I do have to say that the sound is very, very good, and you can hear the detailed working on the samples.
Epic Piano comes with 5 Patches:
- Big Grand: Classic Big Grand Piano Tone.
- Mystic: Cinematic Room Tone.
- EDM & Ambient: Nice Tone with a Cool IR Reverb Unit. Especially designed for EDM, Trance, Big Room, Ambient…etc. genres.
- FX Continuous: Sustained piano fx tone for dream psychedelic sound.
The Big Grand patch (the main patch in my opinion) has a nice dry sounding piano that can then be refined with several reverb impulse responses, all of which sound very good. Gothic Terrain is, to my ears, the best sounding IR, imbuing the piano with a wide and deep sound – ideal for scoring purposes.
In addition, the three mixing channels called Bright, Mystic, and Pluck can turn the sound in any direction. Bright is the direct piano sound itself. Mystic is a more reverberated sound, and Pluck is a short percussive sound which gives the piano more attack.
Playing notes below C0 down to C-2 sounds very impressive. As these two octaves are stretched from the last sampled note C0 (Epic Piano is chromatically sampled from C0 to E6), the sound very deep, rough and scary. I immediately get tons of horror scores sounding in my head. In combination with the Mystic mixer channel, cranked fully up while all the others are down, you can design your own deep drones – a welcome “side effect” of Epic Piano. Not only do you get a very good sounding piano, but what is also a great and simple sound design tool. Listen to a small example I came up with in approx. 10sec – Epic Piano only.
Conclusion
Epic Piano is a good sound library – this is fact. It can also be reached for if you are in need of standard horror piano sound FX – a nice extra. The only problem I can see (or not see!) is that some GUI elements are really hardly to read, such as the mixer channel settings, the button descriptions of the on/off switches, and the settings on the FX. All in all, however, I can say that if you are in need of a piano and/or still do not have enough piano libraries, Epic Piano is hard to ignore at this great price point.
Noiseash Tools – Epic Piano
Installation – 100%
Sound – 90%
Interface – 90%
Patches – 85%
Value – 90%
91%
89/100
Epic Piano is a good sounding Yamaha C3 sample library, and a bargain at $49.00.