The Best Free Piano VST for Grand, Soft and Electric Piano Sounds

The best free piano VST depends on which piano you mean. For a soft, felted acoustic sound, Spitfire LABS Soft Piano is hard to beat. For a general free grand piano VST, Sound Magic Piano One is a long-standing option. For electric piano, our own Keys models both the tine and reed sounds and is free forever. And before you download anything, check your DAW: Logic Pro, FL Studio and Ableton Live already include usable pianos.

Free piano VSTs at a glance

Free grand piano VSTs

A free grand piano VST is the hardest instrument to get right for free, because a real grand changes tone with every velocity, every pedal position and every note's sympathetic ringing. Free versions usually save space with fewer velocity layers, shorter sample tails or no pedal noise. That's often fine in a mix, where the piano shares space with drums and vocals. It shows more on exposed solo piano.

Sound Magic Piano One is the free grand most people try first, and it's a reasonable starting point for ballads, pop and demo work. Whichever free grand you pick, a few moves make it sound more expensive:

• Use real sustain pedal data. Holding notes with the mouse in a piano roll never sounds like pedalling. Record CC64 from a keyboard, or draw it in.
• Vary the velocity. Identical velocities are the main reason a programmed piano sounds mechanical. Randomize slightly, then accent the melody.
• Add your own room. Many free pianos are recorded close. A short plate or room reverb on a send, such as Lumen's Piano Hall preset, puts it in a space.
• Cut the low mids in a mix. A full piano fights the bass and the vocal between about 200 and 500 Hz. A gentle cut there clears space.

Soft piano VSTs for film, lo-fi and ambient

A soft piano VST, often called a felt piano VST, is a piano recorded with felt between the hammers and the strings, or played very quietly with the mics up close. You hear the mechanism: the key, the hammer and the damper. That intimacy is why soft pianos dominate film scoring, ambient music and lo-fi beats.

Spitfire LABS Soft Piano is the best-known free example. It runs inside Spitfire's free LABS plugin, which you install through their app, and it has a deliberately small set of controls. For more variety, Pianobook hosts a large collection of free community-sampled pianos, many of them uprights and felt pianos with plenty of character. Most of those load in the free Decent Sampler player.

Soft pianos already sound old and close. To push them further toward lo-fi, put a tape plugin such as Dust on the track, start from the Lo-fi Keys preset: wow, hiss, crackle and a narrower frequency range, with Mix to taste. Read our guide to tape saturation for why that works.

Free electric piano: Keys (ours)

If the part calls for an electric piano rather than an acoustic one, a Rhodes-style or Wurli-style sound often sits better in a modern mix. It takes less space than a grand, it bites through drums when you play hard, and it suits neo-soul, R&B, lo-fi and funk.

Keys is our free electric piano VST. It models two instruments: Tine, the round, bell-like suitcase sound, and Reed, the brighter, nasal reed piano. Because it's modelled rather than sampled, every note reacts to how hard you play. Bark sets how much the pickup growls on hard notes, Bell sets the metallic ping at the start of each note and Dynamics sets how much velocity changes level, brightness and bark. Tremolo or autopan, a four-stage phaser, chorus, tube drive and room reverb are built in, and it comes with 45 presets. Keys is not affiliated with the makers of the original instruments; Rhodes and Wurlitzer are trademarks of their respective owners.

Play the demo with your computer keyboard. Classic Tine Stage is a straight tine electric piano with tremolo off and a little drive. Play softly, then hard, and listen to the tone go from round to growling.

For more on electric pianos specifically, see our guide to the best Rhodes piano VST options.

Piano plugins already in your DAW

Check your stock instruments before downloading anything. They're already installed, they're tested with your DAW and some are excellent.

• FL Studio: FL Keys is the stock piano FL Studio plugin, included in every edition. It covers acoustic and electric piano sounds and loads in a click. See plugins for FL Studio for adding third-party VST3 instruments.
• Logic Pro: the Library includes sampled grand pianos and Vintage Electric Piano, a modelled instrument with tine and reed models. Logic's pianos are among the best stock options.
• Ableton Live: depending on your edition, Live includes a Grand Piano pack and the Electric electric piano instrument. See plugins for Ableton.
• GarageBand: includes grand and electric piano patches, and projects open in Logic Pro if you move up.

How to choose a virtual piano VST plugin

A virtual piano VST plugin is built in one of two ways. Sampled pianos play back recordings of a real instrument, note by note and velocity by velocity. Modelled pianos calculate the sound with physics or circuit models. Sampled libraries capture the real thing in a real room but take disk space and RAM. Modelled instruments are small, load instantly and react continuously to velocity, but their realism depends entirely on the model.

1. Pick the piano the song needs. A bright grand for pop, a felt piano for intimate scores, an electric piano for soul and R&B.
2. Check formats. Logic needs AU, Pro Tools needs AAX, and most other DAWs use VST3.
3. Check the installer. Some free libraries need a separate app or sample player, such as LABS or Decent Sampler.
4. Play it with a keyboard. A piano that sounds good from the piano roll can still feel wrong under your fingers. Test velocity response and the sustain pedal.
5. Judge it in the mix. Solo piano demos flatter big, wide libraries. In a full arrangement, a smaller, focused sound often works better.

For more free instruments beyond pianos, see our free VST instruments guide and our free plugins page.