Floating Upstream (live drums vs. CP80 piano)
By cTrix on January 11, 2026 5:34 pm
This took a lot of work.
Drums : Live on Roland TD07 module (VQD)
Main Keys: Kawai controller + Electric Grand 80 (Yamaha CP80 plugin)
Electric Bass : BassFingers
Hammond / Choir : Spectrasonics Omnisphere
The Yamaha CP80 is an odd one. It was an amazing solution for 1976 - cramming a realistic sounding electro-mechanical piano into a roadcase was no small task! However, they were mostly used as a compromise for a real Grand Piano on stage. Very clever design to sell into venues and touring professionals but as soon as Yamaha released their digital AWM pianos in 1985, they discontinued the CP80 overnight! A few people still swear by them though.
Because it’s electro-mechanical with hammers it has a sonic palette which is different. It sounds like a piano, but doesn't quite hit the mark... in an analogue way! You could change the setup to get different sounds on it and Waves have implemented a “Formant” knob which changes the whole internal pickup configuration on the fly. It’s wild being able to dial this in for different sections of a tune - something I’m doing here.
I’m using BassFingers for bass. I picked up my real bass but haven’t changed the strings in 10 years so my fingers were gone within about 2 minutes! Laaaaame. But again, it was fun trying to make the vst sound real.
Drums were played live outta the headphone socket of the TD-07 brain (that’s all it has!). Only issue is it doesn’t do zoning or side-sticking BUT the HH / snare / kick combo is very responsive. The toms and cymbals are a bit vanilla here - and I can’t do cymbal rolls on it - but I did do all the percusion by playing the toms with my hands. One day I’ll try out the MIDI over USB but for now I’m focusing on live playing rather than fixing stuff in MIDI.
The drums were a bit of a disaster actually. I originally recorded using the "Compact Kit" but it just sounded odd in the mix, so I went back and re-recorded the drums using the Acoustic kit tuned up a bit and it fit a lot better. Only issue is I had a jam session with my metal trio right when I was about to start recording the new drums (I'm the guitarist! hahaha) so I picked up where I left off today but it took me until 10pm to get back in the vibe. Yeah. So very late night for a Sunday.
But this is what Weekly Beats is for huh? Practising and noodling around :-P Hand in the air for super sharp Sundays!
I spent far too long on this tune. But it's probably one of the best non-electronic things I've done ever.
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on gran turisimo 2 trying to buy a supra type beat 