This free VST and AU instrument gives you a choice of five sampled pianos, from the lieks of Steinway, Yamaha, Fender and more. Starting off with its four envelope controls – Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release – which change the sound’s character either slightly or wildly, depending on your preference. If you’re looking for a sampled VST piano and electric piano instrument with a little more control, Keyzone Classic could be the one for you. It runs in your DAW as a VST/AU/AAX plugin. You can get Soft Piano now, for free, from the LABS website, along with other free plugins. As the sampling’s been done by the experts at Spitfire, the nuance and feeling of a piano not going at full blast has been distilled into a very special instrument.Īs the sampling behind Soft Piano is very deep, there are only three controls: Expression (far-left) can be thought of as a volume control, the middle slider determines the dynamic response (ie, how much Soft Piano responds to your MIDI velocity), and the right-hand knob provides reverb. Released as part of Spitfire’s epic LABS project, which offers simple but hellishly well-sampled instruments, the Soft Piano plugin offers the character of a low-key, dampened piano.

You can grab it at the Versilian Studios website. This particular piano has been recorded with two wide, close mics, and offers Reverb, Panning and Volume controls, alongside Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release envelope settings. Despite the layers of sampling on show here, it won’t tax the hard drive as much as some virtual pianos, requiring about 250MB. 1 features three velocity layers and is sampled in round-robin, meaning there are multiple samples for the same note to reduce repetition. Recorded at the Berklee College of Music, and packaged into a lightweight package for Mac or PC and for the full version of Kontakt, this piano could well set the standard in realistic piano VST instruments. Every single one works cross-platform on both PC and Mac machines.

There’s a diverse selection of both good and bad virtual ivories out there, but we’ve sorted through them to bring you the ultimate list of the very best free piano plugins in the world right now. Whether you just want to pull up a simple sound that works straight from the patch, or you’re looking for a sophisticated recreation of a concert grand to bake into a complex production, there are a great many free piano VST and AU instruments out to meet your needs.

The Best 10 Free Piano VST Plugins for PC/Mac

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