Casspinette Toy Piano by Decent Samples [Decent Sampler]

Description

A few months ago, Max Goldberg texted me: he’d seen this Casspinette Toy Piano at Goodwill and wanted to know if I was interested. Well, of course, I was. As soon as I was able to meet up and grab the instrument, I brought it home and sampled it.

The Casspinette was made by the N. D. Cass Company of Athol, Massachusetts – a company that existed for more than a hundred years, before eventually folding in 2003. The Cass company’s tine-based toy pianos were very popular in the ’60s and ’70s, and there are a fair number of these floating around flea markets and thrift stores. Nowadays, many people modify them to add pickups or “prepare” them for use in experimental music. They have a bright, metallic timbre that’s ethereal and bell-like, but also somewhat mechanical sounding. The tines produce odd, detuned overtones, and because they are all attached to a single metal frame, the instrument has a sort of built in resonance, almost like a reverb tank.

I recorded the instrument both with room mics as well as with a piezo sensor clipped onto one of the tines. As the two recording methods produced substantially different sound, I’ve included a control to fade between the two sets of samples.

– Dave

The sample library works with the free Decent Sampler player plugin. Download it here.