Everett Grand – Free Sampled Piano Instrument for Ableton Live

Not long ago, I decided to sample my father’s antique baby grand piano, made by Everett, a company founded in the late 1800s in Boston, Massachusetts. I haven’t been able to research enough to discover how old this particular instrument is, but I’m pretty sure they stopped making grand pianos in the 1940s, making only consoles after that time.

At any rate, this particular piano has a wonderful warm sound, with a slight “unison” effect from being just a little bit out of tune; each note is right on target, but because the higher notes each use 2 or 3 strings to give them enough volume, a natural chorus happens when each set of strings isn’t precisely in tune with each other. Such a thing can sometimes be too much, or create a “honky-tonk” piano sound, but in this case gives the resulting sampled instrument a lot of character!

This is the “lite” version, since you might be surprised to find out there are only 9 samples! I recorded C and F# across the middle few octaves, and it turned out better than I thought it would. Maybe someday I’ll go back and sample all 88 keys, but for now, I’m enjoying how this one sounds and plays.

Using the Everett piano Sampler instrument, I recorded several improvisations on my Push 2, and put together an album called Notes to Self that I released informally last month. The natural chorus/unison effect seemed to lend itself to experimenting with dissonant note combinations, and so I really enjoyed playing around a lot with the various exotic scales built into the Push. Feel free to listen to it on Youtube, and the Soundcloud demos, and to download the Everett Grand for your own compositions!

(requires Ableton 10.1 or above)