The Tack Piano

We Have the Sound Nailed

Important note: This software requires the FULL version of Kontakt 5.5.2 or above and will only run in DEMO mode when used in the FREE Kontakt Player engine.

• Piano library for Kontakt featuring an upright with thumb-tacks on the hammers.
• With a more percussive sound, it’s often used to evoke the feeling of a honky-tonk, associated with ragtime pieces in old Hollywood Western movies.
• Fully mixable 3-channel perspectives, 8 velocity layers and 6 round robin.

This is the most comprehensive tack piano ever created.

Everybody loves the sound of the good old Mrs Mills piano from Abbey Road Studios.

I remember hearing “In the Lost and Found” by Elliott Smith for the first time and falling in love immediately with the sound of a tack piano. I was obsessed to get the same sound and make a sample library, that was when I released W-Honky back in 2010. It was a basic upright piano mixed with a synthesized waveform to get the metal pluck. No round robins, no velocity layers, no release samples were present in W-Honky. So, in 2015 I released the first version of The Tack which included release samples, round-robin and built-in effects.

And today we release a new version of The Tack.

The Tack Piano is completely re-sampled from scratch, it sounds better than ever and is now a completely authentic tack piano featuring a new GUI with top-notch features that make it unbeatable and a dream come true for tack piano fans like myself. Equally at home in music, sound design or FX, the Tack Piano is like no other and a must-have addition to your piano collection.

Mixer

The Tack Piano features a full mixer with which you can control the three mic positions separately:

• Close: recorded with two Neumann KM184 placed right above the hammers.
• Mid: recorded with two Sennheiser 421 placed below the keys at a mid-distance.
• Far: recorded with two spaced Neumann TLM 103 at the back of the room.
• Mix: a combination of the three mic positions in a single file in order to save RAM.

With a load/purge switch for each channel, pan, volume, mute/solo, stereo width from 100% stereo to mono and output selector for mixing the different channels on your DAW.

Effects

The library features our advanced effect script already implemented in Legacy Drums and some freebies. This script lets you insert any effect in any of the 8 available slots, including:

• High-Quality EQ.
• Various types of compressors.
• Modulation: chorus, flanger, phaser.
• Distortion / Saturation / Tape
• Algorithmic and convolutional reverb with more than 40 custom impulse responses.
• Amp simulators.
• More.

Settings

From the settings page, you can control basically any parameter you might ever need. Divided into four sections, you can find:

• Round robin: the piano was sampled with 2 true round-robin repetitions, you can select the number you want here plus a neighbour borrowing option for extra repetitions using scripted round robin.
• Velocity curve: control how the library reacts to incoming midi notes.
• Noises: control the volume of the non-tonal parts of the piano. Release sample volume, key on and key-off samples and pedal noises (sustain, soft pedal and sostenuto).
• Sound: sympathetic resonance when the sustain pedal is pressed, sample start offset, overall timbre and dynamic range.

This script boosts exponentially the sonic capabilities of the library, easy to use in a simple and elegant design.

Specs

• Size: 14.22 GB
• Samples: 9,118
• Mic positions: 3 + mixdown
• Velocity layers: 8
• Round robin: 2. Up to 6 with neighbour borrowing
• Works with: Kontakt 5.5.2 – Full version required. Kontakt Player will run in demo mode.

System Requirements

Important notes: 

• The FULL version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5.2 or above is required to run this software.
• This software will not function in full within the FREE Kontakt Player engine and will only be available in DEMO mode.