Impact Soundworks – Water Piano $69

>Sometimes the strangest and craziest ideas lead to fruitful creative territory, and out of all the conventional acoustic instruments the piano seems to have borne the brunt of invasive sonic experiments. Pianos ‘prepared’ with a host of sound-altering mechanical elements have been captured and distilled into digital instrument libraries over the years, though the recording of a burning piano for Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere arguably represented the ultimate example of an instrument suffering for art’s sake.

Impact Soundworks has chosen to explore the polar opposite with its new instrument library based around a piano filled with water! Water Piano was created in partnership with YouTuber Mattias Krantz and involved filling a waterproofed piano case with lots of water and recording it at different water levels. Within this Kontakt-based instrument you can control the ‘Water Level’ from dry to fully submerged. This might just sound like a gimmick, but with a single control a pleasant-sounding piano is transformed into its more muted and odder alter-echo. The lower registers transform into something akin to a palm-muted piano, whilst higher keys continue to ring out in a more conventional way.