Naked Metamorphosis 1

Mr Sandbags

I recently bought the Imperfect Samples Braunschweig Upright (Pro) sampled piano for Kontakt after falling in love with the sound of the demos.

I have several sampled pianos (Akoustik Piano’s, alas now discontinued, Kontakt pianos, Logic pianos, etc…) but none of them had the kind of rich, deep, sound I was looking for. I wanted something like the piano Michael Andrews uses in the Donnie Darko score. When I heard the Schimmel demo from the Imperfect Samples website I realised I’d met my piano.

Since then I’ve been using the Braunschweig upright every day as my practice piano and I just love the sound of it.

Several people have asked about the sound so, rather than point them at the demo’s, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and do another take on Philip Glass Metamorphosis-1. I learned this piece some time ago but it had drifted away from me in the meantime and that made me sad. I wanted to get it back.

I spent half an hour re-familiarising myself with the score and it pretty quickly started coming back to my hands. Once I had the chords and timing in reasonable shape I made this recording (via MIDI) into Live.

I used a metronome at 90bpm which is slow enough that I could semi-comfortably keep time without too many mistakes (I had to edit out a couple of blips in the MIDI). However the tighter I try to get my timing the less control I have over the dynamics. When I was practising without the metronome it sounded better, softer. But, alas, I didn’t record that.

Another issue is that my use of the sustain pedal is still rather hit and miss and this creates some abrupt changes from a rich, thick, tail to silence that somewhat spoil the effect. I guess, again, it’s just practice. I’ll aim to do a better take another time.

Lastly I didn’t quite finish the song since I forget to put the 3rd page of the sheet music where I could see it. When I got there I realised I couldn’t quite remember how it ends. Hopefully PG would forgive me.

In terms of production I didn’t use any effects either in Kontakt or in Live, you’re hearing the naked Braunschweig Upright (Mic pos. 2) as it comes out with just a compressor & limiter on the master channel to tame any output spikes.

I love this piano and a better version will be forthcoming (after a lot more practice!)