Gathering Assets

Download the Assets

This walkthrough needs three kinds of assets, none of which ship with the editor:

• Custom assets — the background art and control graphics used in UI: Static Layout, plus any ready-made processor presets used in sound design. Download them here: classical-piano-walkthrough-assets.zip
• Piano samples — the sound source for the piano voice, covered in detail below. The same download also includes the damper and pedal noise samples used later, in Sound Design (Pass 2), to add mechanical realism — no separate download needed for those.
• Reverb IR sample — a single impulse response used for the instrument’s global reverb, covered in detail below.

Download everything and unpack it wherever you like on disk — the exact location doesn’t matter yet. Where it matters is covered next, when the project itself gets created.

The Piano Samples: Salamander Grand Piano

The piano voice is built on the Salamander Grand Piano, a freely licensed multisample of a Yamaha C5 grand recorded by Alexander Holm. It’s widely used across the sample-library world, which is exactly why some care is needed in choosing where to download it from.

Format warning. The Salamander Grand Piano circulates in several different packagings, including a FLAC-based one. FLAC files are not supported by this platform’s importer — only individual WAV files. Make sure whatever you download unpacks into individual .wav files, not .flac. Bit depth (16-bit vs. 24-bit) does not matter; either works fine.

The recommended source is the SFZ Instruments GitHub Pages mirror, which distributes the piano as WAV files alongside SFZ files (an SFZ-format sampler definition this platform doesn’t use, but the WAV files inside are exactly what’s needed):

sfzinstruments.github.io/pianos/salamander

This page offers two separate downloadable archives — one 16-bit, one 24-bit. It does not matter which you pick; grab either one.

Note on the archive format. Both archives are compressed as .tar.xz. This is a perfectly normal, safe compression format, but because it’s less common than .zip, some browsers or antivirus tools flag the download as suspicious. It is not — this is a false positive. Most systems can extract .tar.xz natively, or with a tool like 7-Zip. Once unpacked, ignore the .sfz file(s) in the archive — only the individual .wav files under the samples folder are needed.

Alternative source. If the GitHub Pages download gets flagged in a way you would rather avoid, the same sample set (bit-for-bit identical) is also available from FreePats, which hosts several different piano sample sets on one page:

freepats.zenvoid.org/Piano/acoustic-grand-piano.html

This page is not dedicated to the Salamander piano alone — it lists multiple acoustic grand piano sample sets, so navigate to the correct section (the one labelled Salamander Grand Piano) rather than grabbing the first download link you see.

Ultimately, the exact source doesn’t matter — what matters is ending up with a folder of individual WAV files, at either 16 or 24-bit, rather than FLAC or any other format.

The Reverb IR: EMT-140 Plate

The instrument’s global reverb is a convolution reverb, built around a single impulse-response (IR) recording rather than an algorithmic simulation. This walkthrough uses an IR of a classic EMT-140 plate reverb unit, from a freely available set of recordings here:

oramics.github.io/sampled/IR/EMT140-Plate

The page offers several variants of the same unit. This walkthrough uses emt_140_bright_2.wav — the second download link on the page. Download that one specific file; the others aren’t needed.

Create the Project

Open the Editor. The launch screen greets you with a list of recently opened projects and a button to start a new one.

Click Create New Project, then pick a folder and a name in the file dialog.

Keep the project folder separate from the assets folder. Wherever you choose to create the project, make sure it’s a different location from wherever the piano samples, the reverb IR, and the custom assets were unpacked above. The two folders have no relationship on disk — nothing gets pulled into a project by being copied nearby. Every asset is added explicitly, one import step at a time, starting in the next section. Keeping the folders apart from the start avoids the temptation to drop raw files straight into the project tree instead of importing them properly.

This walkthrough uses classical-piano as the project name, but the name is arbitrary — use whatever you like.

Once the project is created, the editor launches the standalone plugin automatically and shows the new project’s minimal default structure.

Import the Piano Samples

In the project file tree, expand assets and right-click the samples folder. Choose Import audio file(s).

A dialog opens asking whether to import individual files or an entire folder.

Choose the whole-folder option and point it at the samples folder unpacked from the Salamander download earlier. With 16 velocity layers spread across the keyboard — plus the damper and pedal noise samples bundled in the same folder — that’s a large number of individual WAV files — importing the whole folder in one pass avoids selecting them one by one.

All the samples are now available as project assets, ready to be mapped onto the keyboard in the next chapter. Only the sustain samples are mapped there; the damper and pedal noise samples stay unused until Sound Design (Pass 2).

Import the IR Sample

In the project file tree, expand assets and right-click the impulse_responses folder. This time, choose Import single file — the reverb only needs the one WAV file downloaded above, not a whole folder. Pick emt_140_bright_2.wav in the file dialog.

The IR sample is now available as a project asset. How it gets used by the convolution reverb is covered in Sound Design (Pass 1).

Import the Custom Images

The dBdone custom asset bundle downloaded at the start of this chapter contains an images folder, needed for UI: Static Layout. Import it now, the same way as in the 303 walkthrough.

In the project file tree, expand assets and right-click the images folder. Choose Import image(s).

The image import dialog opens.

Click Add image(s) and navigate to the unpacked custom asset bundle, into its images folder. Select every file in it — there’s no other file type mixed in here to leave out — and confirm the selection.

One of the images is a phase bitmap (a filmstrip). Unlike the 303 walkthrough, no manual configuration is needed for it here — orientation and frame count are already correct as supplied. Click OK to finish the import.

Outline

• Import the custom processor presets