There are many great sounding pianos as alternatives to The Hammersmith, although many of these will have been recorded without a MIDI system, and will have to have relied on a human. Despite being an enormous library only the mic samples in use are loaded, so you won’t find yourself maxing out your RAM with a single instance.Īlternatives Most samplers come with a grand piano by default, but upgrading to a dedicated library like The Hammersmith is a huge leap in realism. If I Had a Hammer The Professional Edition is a pretty massive 52GB, and initial loading times were quite slow, but a quick Batch Re-Save in Kontakt sorted this out, bringing loading times down to only a few seconds. The different mic options provide a different set of tonal options, and with the Professional Edition you can select up to three microphones – one close, one mid and one room – to blend together to get the required sound. However, this is really the only difference between the two editions of The Hammersmith. The Standard Edition of The Hammersmith only has the Neumann M49 close mic pair and the M50 Decca Tree room mics, with no middle distance mic options. For the mid positions, a pair of Schoeps MK4s and a pair of Neumann KM133D, and for the room mics, there is a Neumann KU100 binaural head and a Decca Tree arrangement of Neumann M50s. The piano was then tracked with engineer Peter Henderson, who selected six microphone options in three different positions.įor the close, detailed mic positions, Peter and Sonic Couture opted for a pair of Neumann M49s and a single AKG D19. Stop! Hammer Time To record the instrument, Sonic Couture took the piano to British Grove, Mark Knopfler’s studio which is suitably close to Hammersmith in west London. James Thompson from Sonic Couture tells us that the MIDI system didn’t respond to very quiet velocities, and so a human musician was required, but for the most part the company was able to record everything without a human presence. This enabled the team to capture the library in incredible detail without having to deal with the inconvenience of having a musician in the room. What Sonic Couture has found with this piano, however, is a rare Model D modified with a MIDI system. The Hammersmith is a straight-up acoustic grand – a Steinway Model D no less. This isn’t the first time the company has sampled pianos, but previously the libraries have been at the weirder end of the spectrum, with bowed and plucked strings.
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