[igorski]

So I bought myself a toy piano for using it's cutesy, high pitched sounds for vile evil purposes.

Only to find out that there are no sharps and flats (i.e. the black keys are there, but they just don't do anything) and that the keys aren't the most reponsive. I.e. sometimes they are willing to create a sound, at others the piano remains silent. LAME!

Enter a daft idea. I mic'ed up the piano and recorded all the notes with 3 types of attack each (i.e. a 'soft touch', a 'neutral touch' and a 'hard punch-like-stab-to-the-little-plastic-keys') and pitch shifted the closest notes to the missing black key notes. Then I loaded it in a sampler (Kontakt3, people mad enough to want this NKI patch can mail me) and made all the arrangements for the samples to be triggered by MIDI data.


The Bontempi toy piano and below the MIDI controller that will later on trigger it's sounds.

Long story short:

now using a MIDI controller / keyboard you can comfortably control a 1.5 octave toy piano, with access to enharmonic notes and touch sensitivity...



You can hear me play some nonsense on a MIDI keyboard, where the output are the sampled notes. I turned on some delay from a Lexicon PSP84 during the end for added atmosphere, the beauty of having a 'toy piano' in the electronic domain is that sound can now be processed by racks / pedals / software, god knows what.


Recording a toy piano...

Yes, I realise I'm a tit. I even skipped breakfast for doing this. One should never skip breakfast.

The toy piano in action

[w00dy]

you sir are an insane genius

[Crawdaddy]

Man...........................thats almost a Hammond B3.

[dorio]

You are good at bricolage Igor

[igorski]

The only good thing is that the g/f now goes "Oh you don't actually need the toy piano anymore now you can control it from that other thing ? Good, it looked stupid, can't you do that with the rest too ?".

No I can't!!

[noodle69]

that sound was awsome , like a nasty little music box that tears your flesh away from your face as you are mesmerised by the beauty of its evilness.

[seanm18]

the damn thing should have had sharps and flats. how do they expect kids to learn with this?

[slayker]

that is awsome, but maybe painting it would make it seem better idk, and yeah as said above, it should of had sharps and flats now kids and gonna be like wth is a sharp and a flat?! but we can teach them that after but it be better with flats and sharps and if it was more responsive...

[KaZu]

Holy crap!!! More like two of the best spent hours of your life. What an interesting project