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. 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 plug-in 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 detuning to achieve chorus-type sounds, or relationally tuned by -/+ 1 octave, as well as detuning 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 detuning. 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.

• Dual Piano Layers - The 2 layers use 88 x 16bit 48k samples, one for each note.
• Filter - Cascadable up to 8 times and includes Low Passes, Hi Passes, Band Passes, Comb, Low Shelf, Hi Shelf and Peak.
• 2 ADSR Envelopes - Simple Envelopes. Envelope 2 can either be used to control Piano 2 volume or used to shape the Filter Cutoff Frequency.
• Drive - Auto Volume Distortion
• Arpeggiator - With many modes include classic Arp modes.
• Microtuner - Microtuner uses most standard Scala files of any size for custom tunings
• SoundScaper - Comb / Delay / Reverb Effect for creating interesting soundscapes.
• Flanger/Filter - Switchable between Flanger and Filter effect, LFO has over 300 predefined shapes with smooth control as well as standard shapes.
• Stereo BPM based Delay - Synced delay.
• FX Routing - 3 different Paths available.
• Drift - Adds a random pitch detune with each note played.
• Stereo Spread - Allows setting a random value to the Pan of each voice.
• Recorder - Allows recording directly to disk at 16/24/32 bits. Wavs are auto-named by date and location is set via a config file.
• Limiter - Output is limited to prevent clipping.
• Default - Sets Piano to default settings
• Randomize - Randomizes all settings. There are also local randomizers in each section.

The Piano also includes two bonus instruments:

Homegrown Piano B - A second sample set from the Steinway B which was recorded at a harder velocity than the original Piano. The harder attack results in a much brighter sound and as a result has a very different character. It has all the same features as Homegrown Piano but comes as a separate instrument called Piano B. Patches are interchangeable between the two instruments.

Homegrown Rhodes - Also included as a second bonus instrument is Homegrown Rhodes which uses samples from a well worn Rhodes Piano and has one sample per key. The Rhodes had a long history on a cruise ship and was rumored to have been played by Duke Ellington. Some of the keys are in bad condition and the idea was to capture the instrument as is, rather than creating a realistic Rhodes emulation. It has all the same features as the other Pianos but with the addition of adjustable key noises.