Cassette Toy Piano for SFZ Player

The Idea & Process

Cassette Toy Piano is a collection of 5 instruments based on a children toy piano. First of the five included instruments is of course just a raw toy piano recorded on a cassette and while it is a nice and useful sound most toy pianos are very… imperfect in their nature. Because of that, the main aim for this collection was to create additional variations of the raw sound to embrace what’s good in it (with things like spring reverb, granular synthesis, etc.) without losing its original (and sometimes) creepy sound.

So to sum everything up - Cassette Toy Piano is a collection of 5 instruments recorded with 3 dynamic layers using 2 different cassette decks (one with a more neutral sound and the other with a much more lo-fi and degraded sound). Overall there are 1112 samples - 111 samples per deck, plus 2 noise samples from each deck (1,71 GB of uncompressed 24-bit WAV files).

Every note has been carefully denoised with a high-quality algorithm to avoid noise stacking when playing more than one note (there’s still some noise left in the samples to avoid denoising artifacts). Noise can still be added with the noise knob - it’s much more flexible this way and allows the ability to adjust the volume of the noise independently whilst also applying parameters such as filtering. It also creates a more realistic sound, so when playing a five-voice chord, only one sample of noise instead of five stacked on top of each other will be heard.

The End Result

Useful and fun production tool

If you like vintage sounds and you're looking for something to enhance your production toolbox, then this product will be for you.

Simulated Round Robin

Makes faster note passages sound more realistic and adds to the overall nonlinearity of the instrument - available in Kontakt and SFZ versions only.

Variety of sounds

Aside from the sound of a cassette record with this instrument, you can easily create some weird sounds and there are already quite a few presets included to get you started (Kontakt & Ableton Live versions only).

Features

• Available in multiple popular formats: Kontakt 5, Ableton Live 9, Logic, SFZ & Multiformat
• 1,71 GB of uncompressed 24-bit WAV samples (1112 samples in total)
• Recorded on 2 different decks
• Simulated round-robin in Kontakt and SFZ versions
• 5 instruments
• 2 noise samples (each 2 minutes long)
• 3 dynamic layers
• Organic sound with lots of little imperfections

SFZ Version

• Compatible with any SFZ player, for example: Plogue Sforzando
• Simulated round-robin
• 20 basic presets (with and without simulated round-robin for each deck)

System Requirements

• Compatible with any SFZ player, for example: Plogue Sforzando