Homegrown Piano

Homegrown Piano is based around 88 samples of a Steinway B Grand Piano which were recorded at medium velocity. It was developed like many other HGSounds products to be great for Ambient/Atmospheric music, though is useful as a standard Piano as can be heard with the Classical demos on the website. The 128 presets cover a diverse range of sounds from Standard, Honky Tonk, Bright, as well as many echo landscapes, high resonance/distorted, and synthetic instruments.

Though it is primarily designed as a Piano, it is still a synthesizer at heart and as a result has plenty of experimental potential. The VSTi uses 2 duplicate Piano layers, the second of which can be manipulated in several ways leading to a diverse range of Piano based instruments. It can be either identical to Piano 1 allowing slight de-tuning to achieve Chorus type sounds, or relationally tuned by -/+ 1 Octave, as well as de-tuning this will either dull or brighten the sound for example allowing more Harpsichord type sounds.

Additionally the entire instrument can be Tuned via Octaves, Semitones and Fine tunings, and can also be positionally shifted -2/+2 Octaves which moves the positions of the samples as opposed to actual de-tuning. Piano 2 may also be Looped (with adjustable loop points), looped back and forth, Shifted by -1 Octave, and Reversed. The Piano also features an FX section consisting of Drive, SoundScaper – a Reverb/Comb/Delay effect great for building complex atmospheres, a Flanger/Filter with a complex LFO, and a BPM Synced Stereo Delay.

There are 3 FX Routing Modes which allows some flexibility in the sound of the FX. There is also an Arpeggiator with many modes. Finally, the Piano also contains a Microtuner which uses standard Scala files, opening up a huge world of custom tuning possibilities, and comes with 300 tunings as standard and stretch/shrink capabilities.

This demo version has lo-fi 8k samples and no Microtuner, but apart from that is identical to the full Piano.

Many thanks to Damien Traversaz for submitting some excellent tracks using HG Pianos as well as the review!