Review: The Lobby Piano by Man Makes Noise

Man Makes Noise bursts on to the scene with the single best Omnisphere soundset I have yet heard. With original soundsources and deep programming, The Lobby Piano for Omnisphere 2.5 is simply stellar. This soundset can either greatly enhance your current tracks or be used as the basis for an entire modern film score. Superb!

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Review: The Lobby Piano by Man Makes Noise

I cannot quit gushing over The Lobby Piano for Omnisphere 2.5 by Man Makes Noise. It is simply fantastic! If I were to rate this soundset on a scale of 1-10, I would probably give it an 11 – it’s just that good. These sounds are deeply programmed, thoroughly useful, and completely original. This freshman release by Man Makes Noise has me already sitting on the edge of my seat to see what comes next.

The Lobby Piano sells for €49.00 from Man Makes Noise

Thoughts

When I first heard about The Lobby Piano for Omnisphere 2.5 my initial thought was “Oh boy, an Omnisphere soundset with some new piano sounds. Not interested.” Little did I know that this soundset would completely blow me away! “The Lobby Piano” might describe the starting point for the 296 original soundsources contained within, but that description falls far short of the powerhouse that this soundset is. There are plenty of piano-based sounds included, but to say that this is a “piano soundset” is akin to calling a Saturn V rocket a “projectile.” A piano might be the starting point for this soundset, but the end result is something entirely different, wonderful and original.

If you have read any of my previous Omnisphere soundset reviews you might recall that I like to use Omnisphere’s built-in star-rating system to catalog each sound, both for review purposes and for my own music creation process. This helps me easily go back to the sounds that I like. I tend to judge an Omnisphere soundset by how many 4 and 5-star rated sounds I can find in each one. My rating system is, of course, subjective, but I personally judged 84 of these sounds to be 5-star and 74 to be 4-star. That is by far the highest number of quality sounds I have ever encountered in a single soundset! To geek out a little, that means that (again, by my own estimations – your mileage may vary) 79% of the sounds in The Lobby Piano are either 4 or 5 stars. Put simply – that’s just nuts. If you find 50% of the sounds in a soundset to be that good, you should consider it a great buy.

There are 13 different categories of sounds within The Lobby Piano: alarms, arps, atmospheres, basic, bass, designed, fx, hits, keys, pads, perc, pulses, and synths.

The alarms are just plain cool. Think of some of the epic alarms you have heard in your favorite big-budget action/sci-fi films and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here. Bold, bending, distorted, and oh…so…cool! I’m a big fan of arps and find them very useful in my music. The arps here are great. These arps can really double as pulses, and I might even prefer them more as pulses. Hold down a single key and you will have something that can just as easily be at home within Scandi-style minimalist music or an epic trailer track. The atmospheres are excellent. A single note and a little use of the modwheel and you can create an instant sound bed in which to lay a track full of tension and grit. The basses are good as well, with a preset entitled “Bending Danger” stealing the show. The hits are stellar. They are rich, huge, and full of space and atmosphere. I can imagine these hits shaking an entire theater. The fx are useful as well – especially the risers, which are controlled via the modwheel. The keys are playable and rich.

Before I tell you about the pads, let me share a few thoughts on pads in general. I love pads, but they seem to be so overdone. There are more entire libraries dedicated to pads than probably anything else. So, I normally do not get excited about pads within libraries, as I expect that many of them are going to simply repeat what I already have. The pads in Lobby Piano are just stellar. The introduction of distortion into so many of them either natively or, through the use of the modwheel, adds a whole new dimension to them. These pads are beautiful, ethereal, otherworldly, gritty, and raw all at the same time. Again, Lobby Piano knocks it out of the park by providing sounds that I have never heard before. The pulses are very different and not what you probably would expect from pulses. They are something between a rhythmic repeated sound and a riser. Imagine an epic alien horror movie in which the protagonist is being chased by a shadowy creature from another galaxy. That’s the kind of stuff these are made of. There are some cool and useful understated percussion loops (percs) here. Very good both for underscore and trailer use. There are only 5 synth patches here (really, could you ask for more after everything that has been put into this soundset!), but they run the gamut from dreamy to distorted to rhythmic to something in between – really, within only 5 patches!

I think I can unequivocally say that this is the most interesting, useful, and original Omnisphere soundset I have ever heard. For me, this is now the gold standard by which I will be measuring Omnisphere presets. These are simply stunning and represent the best single set of 200 sounds I own.

Facts

The Lobby Piano is available for 49.00€ from Man Makes Noise. This soundset contains 200 presets derived from 296 original soundsources. It requires Omnisphere 2.5 and 578 MB of hard disk space.

The Lobby Piano sells for €49.00 from Man Makes Noise

Demos of The Lobby Piano by Man Makes Noise

Videos of The Lobby Piano by Man Makes Noise

Contributor Raborn Johnson reviews The Lobby Piano by Man Makes Noise
“Man Makes Noise bursts on to the scene with the single best Omnisphere sound set I have yet heard. With original sound sources and deep programming, The Lobby Piano for Omnisphere 2.5 is simply stellar. This sound set can either greatly enhance your current tracks or be used as the basis for an entire modern film score. Superb!”