Water Piano
Character-filled upright piano + morphing liquid sounds for emotional scoring.
$69
Audio Demos
- Scavenger of the Reef (Dressed) Charles Harvey Spears
- Waterways in Time (Water Piano Only) Jon Ong
- Aqua Chill (Dressed) Charlotte McMillan
- Deep Rivers Run Quiet (Dressed) ZW Buckley
- Lucid (Dressed) Jon R. Mohr
- The Waters of Mount Aletheia (Dressed) Andreas Wimmer
- Lucid (Water Piano Only) Jon R. Mohr
- Beneath the Glacier (Dressed) Michael Hoffmann
- Secrets of the Abyss (Water Piano Only) Steven Cravis
- Evolution Water (Water Piano Only) Ori Zur
- Scavenger of the Reef (Water Piano) Charles Harvey Spears
- Aqua Chill (Water Piano Only) Charlotte McMillan
- Beneath the Glacier (Water Piano Only) Michael Hoffmann
- The Waters of Mount Aletheia (Water Piano) Andreas Wimmer
- Deep Rivers Run Quiet (Water Piano Resampled) ZW Buckley
- Deep Rivers Run Quiet (Water Piano Only) ZW Buckley
Overview
A cinematic prepared piano like no other. Water Piano allows you to morph an intimate studio grand piano into infinitely evolving, atmospheric sounds that fit everything from new age to horror to action to chill. Created in partnership with YouTuber engineering genius Mattias Krantz, who filled the piano’s case with gallons of water and recorded it at different water levels you can control, from dry to fully submerged.
Product Info
Supremely unique grand piano
A character-filled studio grand piano recorded totally dry with close mics, then full of hundreds of pounds of water using underwater mics.
Three distinct sample pools
6 dynamics and 2 RRs for both dry and wet (submerged) samples, plus infinitely-sustained, pad-like frozen samples.
Water sound effects
Select from gentle or strong fill, drips, splashes, slaps, swishes, or whisks, mixed in subtly with the piano.
Chromatic sampling
Every key recorded individually for maximum realism and playability.
31 inspiring snapshots
Versatile and creative sounds ranging from playable pianos and plucks, to ambiance and tonal soundscapes.
Features
Streamlined, modern UI
Tone-shaping controls
Microtuning engine
Special convolution reverb
CONSOLE FX rack and mixer
Requirements
2GB disk space
7200 RPM hard drive or solid state drive recommended
4GB of RAM
Higher amounts of memory let you load more instruments.
Apple M1, Intel i5 or equivalent CPU
A faster CPU with more cores will allow you to play more simultaneous voices.
KONTAKT Player 6.7+
This library will run in the FREE Kontakt Player.
Kontakt Requirements - Mac OS
Intel Macs (i5 or higher): macOS 10.14, 10.15, 11 or 12 (latest update).
Apple Silicon Macs (via Rosetta 2 & natively on ARM in Standalone or in hosts that support it): macOS 11 or 12 (latest update)
Kontakt Requirements - Windows
Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10 (latest Service Pack, 32/64-bit). Intel Core i5 or equivalent CPU. Graphics hardware support for OpenGL 2.1 or higher. Windows 10 strongly recommended.
Tutorials
Library Walkthrough
Entire Piano Filled with Water Sounds UNREAL
Featured Artists & Composers
Jeff Broadbent
Assassin’s Creed Identity, Call of Duty Mobile, Resident Evil, Diablo Immortal, Transformers: Dark of the Moon
"ISW creates amazing, creative, and intuitive virtual instruments! I’ve enjoyed using them for over a decade, and they have found their way into many of my music scores. Their wonderfully realistic world instruments showed up in a recent Nexon video game, Shreddage 3 Stratus on the score for Grid, and Super Audio Boy is a favorite for retro sounds, effects, and fun nostalgia. Highly recommended!"
Lena Raine
Celeste, Chicory, Minecraft, Guild Wars 2, Deltarune
Instruments from ISW are a staple of my soundtrack work for games. Vocalisa has been a mainstay vocal aesthetic of nearly every game I've worked on including Celeste & Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Shreddage 3 has also given me the confidence to write some really fun guitar riffs & solos despite not being able to play a real one. I've started incorporating Tokyo Scoring Strings into the acoustic side of my scoring work, and can't wait to try out more from ISW in the future!
Jimmy Hinson
Black Ops 4, Mass Effect 2, There Came An Echo, Borderlands 2
“Between Shreddage, Super Audio Cart, Juggernaut, and Mega Brass I don’t remember the last time I haven’t used an Impact Soundworks instrument in a track. The attention to detail is astonishing and it’s all so easy to use out of the box, which is a big deal.”
We love Mattias Krantz’s unbridled imagination and were excited to transform another of his inventively hacked acoustic instruments into a breathtaking, inspiring sample library (see more of his imaginative and ingenious projects on his YouTube channel). For Water Piano, he took a perfectly playable grand piano and filled its case with 34 gallons of water, recording it at different water levels from dry to fully submerged.
The initial state of Water Piano gives you a bright, vintage sound of a dry (pre-submerged) studio grand piano. Browse through the 36 snapshots and you’ll soon get a sense of Water Piano’s range: everything from lo-fi and honky-tonk to cool reverses to super ambient, new-age pads to dark atmospheric drones to stabs (played in the lower registers) that would be right at home in horror films.
Water Piano’s controls allow you to take these beautifully detailed, one-of-a-kind sounds and morph them into all kinds of other-worldly textures, atmospheric pads, and bizarre, real-sounding-but-not-existing-in-real-life pianos. At the top of the GUI, the wetness controls let you take the sound in greatly divergent directions:
- Water Level: Submerge the sound to increase its muted, underwater character
- Freeze: Lower the temperature until the sound is suspended in time, sustained infinitely as an eternal pad
- Extra Wet: Drench the sound in additional water-morphed reverb
- Water FX: Randomly sprinkle in effects like water slaps, drips, swishes, and whisks
Additional controls include microtuning, pitch editing, and ADSR, as well as tone, pedal, and release sample controls. Shape your sound further with the rich array of effects on the Console page, including EQs, compressors, an assortment of pedals, a phaser, chorus, distortion, tremolo, and many others.
Console is a fully-featured mixer, modular effects rack, and pedal board, designed to give you full control over your mix. Effects include multiple EQs (digital and analog-style), compressors, spatial FX, modulation FX, amps, distortion pedals, reverbs, and more.
Each mic channel can be loaded with up to 8 FX in any order, plus another 8 slots on the master channel, with support for send routing as well. The new “Galois Reverb” added in Kontakt 6 Player sounds fantastic as an alternative to our included custom IRs.
Mattias Krantz is a guitarist and YouTuber known for his wild, imaginative experiments with pianos and guitars. We are collaborating with him to bring his unique instruments to composers and musicians around the world. Check out the first two entries Hammer Klavier and The 88E!
Reviews
Water Piano – Simeon Amburgey
“I’m really surprised at all of the dynamic layers that you can get into it. It’s kind of like a muted piano, but the mute is because of the physical water is in there, muting the strings and the damper…it’s unusual, but beautiful…”
Water Piano – The Sampleist
“It’s very versatile considering all the effects you can put into it, the ways you can change and wrangle the sound, and influence it. I really think this is a library that really opens the door to more sound design options for a piano within the library itself. To be honest, I think for the money, it’s well worth it, especially if you’re willing to take some time to really toy with the sound and record your own…You can really make some high-quality stuff that can be used in films, games, trailers, you name it. I already saved a patch while doing this video and I can see myself doing more.”