Electric pianos are just the coolest things: whether it's the bark of a Wurli or the soulful drive of a suitcase Rhodes, we just love our EPs, and there's hardly a musical genre out there in which they haven't played a key part (ha... no pun intended.) But as usual, the ones that come built-in to most DAWs are a little on the polite side. We've decided to fix that. Prototype EP Kontakt instrument 2Prototype EP is a painstakingly sampled Weltmeister Claviset. Or at least, it may be. That part's a little unclear. Let us explain...

Weltmeister were an East German company who released the Claviset in the early 1960s. It was very similar to the Selmer Pianotron and both instruments shared a quirky electromechanical design in which metal tines were plucked with little rubber plectra, and their sounds then captured by electromagnetic pickups. But while our source instrument conforms to the basic Claviset framework, the output stage, tone control, built-in amplified speakers and indeed the whole wooden housing are all something of a custom job. There's no Weltmeister name on the bodywork and the typical Claviset rocker tabs which made it on to production models are nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a single Tone knob and Volume control, driving twin speakers. The intriguing possibility is that this was an early prototype unit... hence the name ????

Prototype EP sounds like the electric equivalent of one of those bare-bones honkytonk pianos you might have found gracing the parlour of a frontier whorehouse back in the nineteenth century: erratic, raucous, badly-behaved, temperamental. The tuning is far from perfect (or stable); note-to-note buzzes, squeaks and rattles are all present and ncorrect; the clicks, ticks, scrapes and thunks that accompany the plectra dropping back into position have all been meticulously reproduced; and the result is definitely not polite any more. In short, don't try to play a DX7 power ballad on this thing... but if you want to rock a bit of the Stones' Brown Sugar you won't go far wrong.