Play Chopin’s Piano and Mozart’s Harpsichord – Sounds and Presets
Sigal Music Museum sampled, plus new Muse patches
5,0 / 5,0 | 
Mozart and Chopin are two of the great composers of all time. Now you can play instruments that they actually played via the magic of sampling.
Sounds & Presets
This week’s Sounds and Presets offers up some amazing and historical keyboards alongside a new bank of patches for one of the newest. There’s also a free bank of sounds for Xils-Lab’s superb CS-80 re-invention, The Eighty, presets for your Behringer MS-5 and historical speeches to add gravitas to your recordings.
The Sigal Collection Vol.1 by Tempest Instruments
It is easy to sit in our studios, or whatever room it is that you make music in, and look at all our modern gear, and forget that the keyboard instruments we take for granted still use a design that dates back centuries and, in most cases, remains entirely the same.
If Mozart or Chopin themselves walked into these rooms today, besides having their minds blown by the sounds our keyboards make, they would still be able to play their compositions with almost no issues whatsoever.
Thankfully, for us, there are people and organisations that work hard to preserve the instruments of those composers’ times for us to enjoy and marvel over. One such organisation is the Sigal Music Museum in Greenville, South Carolina, U.S.A. Their collection contains some of the most rare and treasured instruments with the aim of preserving, maintaining and educating.
And when you have such a collection, it is almost incumbent on the organisation to share these gems with the rest of the world. These are important collections and the work that organisations like the Sigal Music Museum do is equally important.
We live in a world where sample libraries are almost two a penny, and of those, so, so many are of pianos. But I can guarantee you that few, if any, are like this. Few will contain actual instruments played by the likes of Mozart & Chopin, for example. Contained in this collection are the following exquisite pieces:
- Broadwood Grand Piano, 1845, played by Chopin
- Kirkman Harpsichord (Dual Manual), 1761, A wedding gift from King George III to Queen Charlotte
- Walter Grand Piano, 1815
- Italian Harpsichord, manufacturer unknown, 1660
- Stein Grand Piano, 1784
- Spanish Clavichord, manufacturer unknown, 1780
That is quite some list and each of these has been sampled with the great care and detail they deserve by Tempest Instruments, for whom this is their first commercial sample library. Each instrument is presented within a picturesque front end within Kontakt, and when selected, the camera zooms in on the selected instrument.
The user is then presented with a small selection of parameters with which to tweak the instrument to their taste. Typically, these include a selection of reverbs and mics, but in the case of some, such as the four pedal Walter Piano and Kirkman Harpsichord, there are some instrument-specific settings.
Each instrument is beautifully represented on-screen, including the marvellous painting on the underside of the lid on the Italian Harpsichord. As well as being able to create your own settings, the library comes with 39 presets spread across all six instruments.
There are also some global controls containing, as all good piano libraries should, key lift and pedal samples, the volumes of which can be adjusted to taste. You can also assign extra pedals so you can fully mimic the quadru-pedalled (see what I did there?) Walter Piano. There are also controls for the Round Robin sample behaviour as well as tuning and keyboard range settings.
Do not expect anything comparable to large piano sample libraries of large, modern instruments here. Each instrument in this collection does not betray its age in the slightest. Chopin’s Broadwood Grand Piano, for example, still contains almost all its original strings. The exact same strings Chopin heard when he played it.
The Sigal Collection Vol.1 is, without question, utterly unique and utterly essential for those looking for the sounds of such early classics. The library costs $149 USD, but is currently available for just $129 as a limited introductory offer. Both the full version of Kontakt and Kontakt Player are supported and the library is also NKS compatible.
Roll on Volume 2!
Jexus Moog Muse Soundset by Sounds-For-Synths.com
From some of the oldest keyboards in the world to one of the newest, the magnificent, melifluous Moog Muse (my English Language teacher is smacking me around the back of the head for that blatant alliteration!)
It’s just over a year since we caught sight of the Muse, on stage, at the 2024 Super Bowl Half Time show with Usher. It’s almost a year since myself, and two of my Gearnews colleagues, got to spend some special private time with one in Berlin. It wasn’t, if we are being completely honest, the smoothest of launches. But it finally came and it was worth the wait.
A few firmware updates later and the Muse is now firmly up there as one of the finest modern analogue polysynths today and one of the original factory preset designers has now released a huge bank of sounds for it!
Jexus has been mentioned in this column on more than one occasion and will continue to be so as his work is exemplary. I mean, if Moog Music ask you to contribute to factory presets, you have to be doing something right, right?
And so, in case we thought we didn’t have enough Jexus in our Muses, here we have a superb and large collection of new sounds and sequences which, as Jexus claims, are free from the constraints placed on all sound designers when creating factory presets.
A large number of these sounds are dual-timbre and employ many of the powerful sound shaping tools of the Muse. Everything is presented in the Muse’s .MMP file format for easy installation via the USB flash drive socket.
This bumper package of sounds is available to buy now for $37.90 USD/€36.90 EUR/£29.90 GBP directly from Jexus’ Sounds For Synths website.
20th Century Speeches by Ocean Swift
Most sample libraries I feature here are of instruments. Some are of voices, almost all sung, but few are of speeches. Not least, speeches that have gone down in the annals of time as great, motivational speeches that represent huge moments in history.
So this one is a bit of a rarity, and I quite like it, although I’m not sure quite how often I would actually use it, but I think it’s an interesting item to have in your toolbox. Taking great speeches that are already in the public domain, Ocean Swift, best known for their rather excellent wavetable creation tool, Wavetable Creator, have cleaned them up, categorised them and made them available as a free download!
We’ve got speeches from Churchill, FDR and Nixon to those made by Gloria Steinman, Amelia Earhart and Neil Armstrong. There’s a smattering of U.S. Presidents like Truman and Kennedy and even some by Babe Ruth.
Whether used in part, in their entirety or mashed up and messed around with, this is a nice little collection to have lying around. You can grab the pack, for free, straight from Ocean Swift’s website.
Vangelis Tribute for the Xils-Lab The Eighty
We’ve already mentioned Chopin and Mozart in this article, but another great composer is referred to in this new, free bank of sounds for the excellent CS-80-inspired plugin from Xils-Lab. And there’s no getting away from Vangelis when it comes to “The Eighty”.
If ever an instrument is so inexorably and inextricably tied to one person, it is the Yamaha CS-80 to Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, aka Vangelis. It has to be both a tribute and an albatross around the neck of any instrument that dares to emulate one of Yamaha’s finest creations.
And yet, here we are with another bank of sounds dedicated to the late Greek legend. But, on the plus side, it’s free and it sounds fantastic. You will have to pop over to the Xils-Lab website to hear a demo, but if you have “The Eighty” installed in your plugin folder, you can do far worse than to add this 40-preset collection to its preset bank.
Analogue Essentials for the Behringer MS-5 by Anton Anru
Behringer synth prices keep dropping and some of the instruments are going for silly money, one of which is the rather cool MS-5, their recreation of the revered and venerated Roland classic. Bearing more than a striking visual resemblance, and a pretty decent sonic one too, it can be had for as little as €439/£359 right now!
True to the original, there are no presets on this baby. Everything is programmed right on the front panel and you either have to take notes or a quick snap on the camera phone to recall all your settings. But this hasn’t put off preset developers like Anton Anru.
Provided as a PDF document, each of the 50 patches contains all the relevant settings, along with information on how the patch works, suggestions on performance-friendly tweaks and you will also get a decent education on how analogue subtractive synthesis works!
Handily, Anton also includes audio examples of all the patches so you can compare your input to the author’s own work. Divided into three key sound types (Leads, Bass and Plucks), this collection of sounds really shows off what the synth is capable of.
These patches are available now for just $19.95, directly from Anton’s store page.
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