Spindle

4/10 Spindle is not another grand piano. Orchestral Tools sampled a Rösler upright with soft felt hammers, recorded up close from four microphone positions, with three velocity layers and three round robins per note. The tone is dark and melancholic in that classic Nordic way. I find it perfect for sparse ostinato patterns and understated cues, where the felt character keeps repeated notes from building up mud. The four mic positions cover everything from a woody, dry intimacy to a soft ambient wash.

7 GB installed) through its manager. SINE also runs standalone. Before you install, keep the SINE Player updated, as older versions won’t load newer libraries. If you use FL Studio and hear CPU spikes or stuck notes, enabling fixed-size buffers in the plugin wrapper settings resolves them. With all mic positions loaded, Spindle likes RAM (and that’s an expensive indulgence nowadays), so purge the mics you aren’t using on modest machines.

Verdict: The most characterful free felt upright, and the only piano here that sounds like a Scandinavian film score by default.