Piano Samples

Press a key and a felt hammer swings up to strike a string, which makes it a percussion instrument you can play chords on. The note peaks the moment it lands and falls away from there, so most of what a player does afterward amounts to choosing how long to let it ring.

That mix of attack and sustain leaves one person enough room to hold a bass note in the left hand, lay chords through the middle and carry a melody over the top. Songwriters have leaned on that for generations, sketching arrangements at the keys long before a band hears them.

A grand with the lid raised lets the strings open out into the room, an upright pressed against a wall gives back something tighter and boxier, and the tack pianos of honky-tonk bars got their bite from drawing pins pushed into the hammers. Classic piano samples from those rooms hold onto the tuning drift, the pedal creak and the hammer noise that stayed on the tape.

Gospel players hit their chords square on the beat and let the building answer. Detroit producers dug through records like those for single stabs to repeat across six minutes of a house track, and hip-hop worked the same shelves from another angle, lifting four bars of a left hand and a comp to build on. Most piano loops from that era trace back to somebody's crate.

Grands, uprights and tack pianos share the catalog here, plenty of them with stems so the keys arrive without the band around them. Our Sounds section’s royalty-free piano sample packs need no clearance at all. Our Songs section’s original recordings can be covered by your plan, and both leave you free to release whatever you build out of them.