Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the sound of the piano. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I’m starting to notice the little things. It has been said that early and late in life is when you start to notice things that would normally be insignificant i.e., shapes, colors, smells, and sounds. Maybe this is happening to me musically. I have a large music and sound consumption rate. Maybe I’m going back to basics… Who knows.

A contributing factor is the beauty I have found in the sampled piano sound. The Atmosthing project using the Atmos piano plug in was the start of it. That distant Harold Budd “piano underwater or on the side of a misty mountain” sound intrigues me. I got this free plug in (because of my purchase of the Focusrite digital audio interface) called Addictive Keys. It allows for virtual arranging of microphones around a piano providing a (slight) differing ambient sound to the piano. This made me excited, as variations on the piano sound is my latest fascination. Here is an image of one of the many Addictive Keys configuration pages. This will aid in visualizing what is going on with this plug-in. These microphones can move AROUND, IN, UNDER, or OVER the piano drastically or subtly altering the sound of the piano.

So, using 4 different settings of this along with the Atmos piano plug in from Atmosthing, and a synth/sample plug in called the Orion Sound Module which also provided YET ANOTHER piano sound variation, I charged into the fray.

If you are counting that would be 6… count them SIX different piano timbres being played, hence the name PIANOSPLOSION!!

All of this was done as MIDI files except for the 3 synthesizers toward the end. They were played in live with the MicroKorg synthesizer as analog wave files.

This was done in a total of 12 tracks. Let me know what ya think.