[Shell Rev] Piano Colors: Did NI put pianos on steroids? ;)

Hi gang!

I hope everyone is doing ok?

Editorial

So a while back NI released 'Piano Colors', a Kontakt instrument that would (quote): "Explore the outer limits of a grand piano’s sonic capabilities"? Boooring! At least that's what you may be thinking here at first, I know I did! Yah, if you did then... you may end up surprised.

When it comes to piano's in combination with my home studio then it's a really love/hate kind of relationship with me. With all due respect but I always considered piano's to be quite boring. Oh, it gets worse... I own several sampled piano's, from Alicia Keys and The Grandeur in Kontakt right down to the Grand Piano in Ableton as well as Reason's 'Radical Piano'. And they all have one thing in common: I hardly use any of 'm! Why use something as dull as a piano while you can throw in a cool synth which allows you to actually create dynamic sounds?

Now, I've mentioned a few times already that I mostly consider myself a sound designer / engineer; I love tweaking with those. And although I definitely prefer to dump some kind of synth onto my DAW to give me a base tone to work with fact of the matter is...



That this is an ideal way to start a sound design, because of this:



I know this isn't the best example (only a short snapshot afterall) but even so: is that a square or a sine wave up there? Yah, it roughly resembles a square wave, sure, but those smaller parts? Are we sure this isn't a sined square or something? Honestly... if you're going to dive into sound design then you'll soon discover that a plain piano sound is more than often actually the best way to provide your foundation.

So now I can imagine some people wondering... what does NI's latest (boring?) piano instrument have to do with sound design? Well... everything!

This isn't 'just' a boring piano... ​

True story: I was made aware of a 'rumor' that this new "piano instrument" was going to be released a few days before it did. It would probably be something like 'Noire', or so the rumor went. Curious I decided to install Noire and well... I discovered that it was a piano. Then, and this is the key here (no pun intended), then I got my hands on Piano Colors. Yah, but... what gives? This isn't a piano at all?!

Piano Colors: sound design without the design!

As you can see in my screenshot above there's quite a lot happening here... You can use 2 layers of sound which can be combined by a noise generator. The main layers can be controlled by an arpeggiator and then 'mangles' (or enhanced) by a particle generator / engine.

So basically we get a piano with an arpeggiator (which can be fully customized! Seriously: this is a competitor to Reason's RPG-8 (which I consider the mother of all arpeggiators). But wait... that piano consists of 2 'layers' and as one could expect.. you won't find any oscillators in here but only specific sound controls which allow you to set the tone of the sound, its color, dynamics and you can even pan it across channels. You do get your well known ADSR envelope section though

The arpeggiator is fully customizable...​

And then we have the 'Particles' section. Oh dear.. I have been playing with this instrument on and off for the past month now (and as I always do I totally ignored the manual, so keep that in mind) and to be perfectly honest I could relatively get my fingers behind most section but this one is tricky. Basically it allows you to add more dynamics to your sound by adding specific sound 'particles' to it. So basically it takes parts of an existing piano sound (bowed, plucked, etc.) and then adds those to your other layers. Optionally also adding some extra effects to it.

Finally, as if all this wasn't enough, the whole mixture is then sent through the 'Global' section where you can apply an equalizer and several dynamic effects (saturation, compression, characters, etc.).

So while this instrument may be called 'Piano Colors' it actually has very little to do with a traditional piano other than using the piano sound as a basis ("starting point") to build up the rest of your sound. Seriously, if you load in this instrument and start using the default preset ("Aleatoric sequence") then don't expect something sounding like a piano, not at all actually...

Piano colors comes with a ton of presets (divided between the 'piano', 'pattern', 'pad' and 'combined' sections) which can do a lot for you but.... you know an instrument was made for sound design when you also get an "INIT" option. This is actually a feature that has been with Reason ever since I started using it: it resets the device to a default clear ("vanilla") state which allows you to build your own preset from there.

If you enjoy piano sounds and want to take those to a next, more dynamic, level then this can be just the instrument for you. You don't even have to mess with external effects either because most generally used effects are already provided 'out of the box'.

However... that also brings me to another aspect of this power house: resources.



I'm not sure exactly where to look for specific causes but this critter often manages to push my CPU to its limits, not enough that it affects my sound but as you can see in the upper right corner of my screenshot Live sometimes does have issues to fully keep up and starts sending out warnings. This is a PC with 16Gb of memory and well... just for contexts sake I don't have these issues with other heavy duty Kontakt instruments such as 'Thrill' and / or 'Pharlight'.

So you may want to keep that in mind...

In conclusion

In the overal I'm having a good time with this instrument, it simply cries out to be used for experimentation: if you never bothered with sound design so far and are interested in something to provide more 'dynamics' to your sound (I'm not necessarily talking about compression and boosting frequency ranges, but actual dynamic sounds) then now might be a good time to start messing around.

However, at the same time I also need to stress out that this instrument is very heavy with the required resources and it's noticeable, at least it was on my end.

Hope this can give some of you a few good impressions!