Home / Plugins / Orchestral / 1928 Vintage Grand Steinway (Soundpaint)
by Unknown
8/10 The story behind the 1928 Vintage Grand is half the charm. The Soundpaint team searched music stores across San Francisco for the perfect piano to sample and found a vintage 1928 Steinway with its original strings still intact. They sampled it in remarkable detail. The library contains 4,892 samples across 8 GB of data, and the engine morphs between dynamic layers in real time, so there are no audible jumps between soft and loud playing.
The character is aged and woody, rather than the polished tones offered by most piano libraries, which is exactly why I reach for it. With 32 presets moving from intimate close-up tones to full hall ambiance, it covers cinematic and songwriting duties equally well, and it remains one of the best-sounding free piano plugins I’ve come across. Be aware that it is a heavyweight. The 8 GB footprint and the engine’s real-time processing ask more from your RAM than a typical sampled piano, and the free Soundpaint engine requires an account and an occasional online check-in.
The 1928 Steinway is the free flagship of the Soundpaint platform, and the engine itself costs nothing. If your machine can carry it, this is the vintage character piano to own. Verdict: The most characterful deep-sampled grand on this list, if your computer is up to it.
Links to soundpaint.com — the article includes the official download links.
Orchestral
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