Fractured Piano - Mesmerizing and unorthodox prepared piano sounds for SampleTank

A unique library of experimental piano sounds

Fractured Piano offers a wild variety of altered keyboard sounds. Designed to stir emotion and build tension, the library features sci-fi, cosmic and eerie sounds, action-driven percussive sounds and acid keys, along with dystopian harpsichords and other imaginary or futuristic sounds. It includes 5.4 GB of sample content and 37 SampleTank 4 instrument presets perfect for anything from film scoring to modern pop music production or general funky vibes.

Don't try this at home

Most of the “Piano Howling” family of presets were created by actually screaming into the piano frame, and some were produced using other tricks.

Cymbal Felts were used in different positions pushing and damping the short strings section before the hammers, to produce 4 different sounds (“oscillators” in the sound element) for the “Piano Felt Bass” and other presets using the piano sustain pedal.

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A metal pipe was placed on the low octaves to resonate and create an industrial percussive sound, and different metal chains and other objects to create “undisciplined” harpsichords

The samples had been subsequently generously “synthesized” and processed with the SampleTank 4 engine, to create several presets. The preset description carries the name of the original (“mother”) sample.

If it ain't broken, keep trying

The library was recorded and produced by Filippo Gaetani and Florian Weixelbaumer in the style of the groundbreaking avant-garde John Cage techniques on a beautiful Bösendorfer grand piano recorded at their studio in Vienna, Austria.

Additional editing and sound design were provided by Florian “Flohzirkus” Hager. Vladyslav Hryhoriev contributed with extra presets. Icon artwork by Marco Divic and Filippo Gaetani.

The microphones used for the sampling sessions were: AKG 414, Neumann U47 FET, Shure SM7, Schoeps Boundary BLM 3, CMC 6. Mic preamps: Neumann V 476 B, Api 512C, Manley Dual Mono.

Embrace the wildness

Producer Filippo Gaetani says about the library:

For some of these, to produce the extreme low and extreme high-pitched notes of the Piano Howlings, we set a speaker under the piano playing some of my screamed notes, pitched on higher or lower octaves, and Flow had to press the sustain pedal and mute the speaker, to capture only the decay. There were fun and crazy moments.

Filippo Gaetani

SampleTank 4

The new SampleTank 4 has been re-designed from the ground up to be every musician’s “go to” workstation for music creation, with a completely new rescalable interface, a massively expanded sample library and a new cutting-edge sound engine with efficient disk streaming, to deliver more powerful music creation tools than you ever imagined. What might usually take dozens of plug-ins can be accomplished right inside SampleTank 4, for lightning-fast workflow that keeps your inspiration going.

Fractured Piano works inside SampleTank 4 CS, offering you all the features of the new SampleTank 4* engine and over 4 GB of fresh sounds to get started.

*SampleTank 4.1.4 or later is required for all Cinekinetik libraries.