The Crow Hill Company Mystic Piano [WiN]

• Product: Mystic Piano
• Developer: The Crow Hill Company
• Version: 1.0.1
• Format: VST, VST3, AAX
• Requirements: Windows 10 or later

Other-worldly so often results in resorting to all sorts of processing and trickery. For this release we have kept the trickery firmly out of the box to create a unique and playable take on the piano through “performance-design”.

What started out as a simple “palm muted” experiment (where a hand is placed on a string to mute it into a dull thudding piano sound). Into a week’s worth of experimentation at Castlesound studios ultimately deconstructing and reconstructing the different resonating elements of a piano into a newly imagined instrument that is full of surprises.

Christian Henson the producer and performer of this library asked himself “what would a piano sound like if it was built by hand from scratch by Caractacus Potts?” (the inventor father from Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).

What we have delivered also ultimately gives you control of those different elements (or partials as we call them) to set and forget your preferred timbral profile or indeed use to colour your performance and recordings in real-time.

The 5 key elements (of which you have total balance control) of the mystic piano are muted palms, a combination of plucked elements (depending on which dynamic layer is being triggered); fingers, rubber spoon, guitar plectrum. Isolated sustains including octave harmonics and damper-off. A rare fingered tremolando which builds up performance layers depending on dynamic layer.

Finally with clunking release triggers to accentuate that Caractacus Potts nature of the audio invention we have created. Everything is recorded with numerous round robins, dynamic layers and a fully dedicated set of samples for the pedal down resonance of the piano.