Free piano VST plugins can be pretty challenging to find but I have put together a list of the best sounding pianos and excluded the bad sounding ones for your convenience.
Regardless of the piano sounding real or not it just has to sound good. You can find a lot of great pianos but finding the best free piano VST aren’t easy.
Not to worry, After days of research I have kept the ones that I like and in my opinion, what I think is the best sounding ones.
I will keep this post updated as I find some more worthy ones.
Check out: 9 Best Free Guitar VST Instrument Plugins
So, here are the best free Piano VST plugins in 2021:
- MonasteryGrand
- Piano in 162
- Keyzone Classic
- Versilian Upright Piano
- Piano one
- Room Piano
- Salamander Piano
- DSK Grand
- Soft Piano
- RDG Audio – Free Piano
- Upright Piano
- DSK AkoustiK KeyZ
Best Free Piano VST Plugins
There are a lot of Free VST Piano plugins and the ones that are actually great sounding ones, I have listed them here.
Feel free to try out and listen to what each one of them sounds like and how it can be put to good use. There are in no particular order.
1.MonasteryGrand
This is a pretty new free Piano VST in the industry and comes with a very smooth graphical user interface.
This plugin comes with a lot of features such as automatic harmony and can be used on any genre that you like.
When you download MSoundFactory, which is more like an engine to play this plugin. You can get a whole bunch of effects to play around with.
Definitely this is one of the best sounding piano on this list.
Demo:
More Info/ Download: MonasteryGrand
2.Piano in 162
Piano in 162 is one of the most popular free VST Piano that is on the more realistic sound and can be played using the Kontakt player.
The sound of it is very soothing and roomy instead of a synth-like sound. These are all individually sampled and you can set it up to be velocity-sensitive.
Sampled from: Steinway Model B grand piano
You can play this without a Kontakt Player. You can use something called sforzando and load this as a sound font.
Demo:
More Info/ Download: Piano In 162
3.Keyzone Classic
This actually comes with 5 pianos in it which are Keyzone Piano, Yamaha Grand Piano, Stienway Piano, Basic Electric Piano, and Rhodes Piano.
All of the pianos sound great and infact I like the Yamaha Grand and the Rhodes Piano. Comes with the usual ADSR settings with other controls like velocity, LFO, and detune.
With a little bit of effects and tweaking this plugin can sound wonderful on your tracks. It is free to download and supports multi-OS.
Demo:
More Info/Download: Keyzone Classic
4.Versilian Upright Piano
Versilian Upright Piano is sampled from a Yamaha Upright Piano with a pair of wide and close microphone.
The tone is very clean, precise and has a great sound quality. It has a full decay of up to 30 seconds which is really cool.
The UI isn’t very modern but don’t let that fool you. The plugin supports Windows and macOS.
Demo:
More Info / Download: Versilian Upright Pinao
5.Piano One
Piano One is a free VST Piano plugin that is a VST version of the Yamaha C7 Concert Grand.
Piano One is free with a powerful engine that supports WIn/MAC. It can be pretty complicated to install but there is a video on how to install it.
This plugin is the free version of Neo Piano by Sound Magic. That means, it will be missing certain features but you can get away with it by tweaking the sound with other plugins.
It comes with quite a lot of presets and reverb etc.
Demo:
- Windows & Mac (64/32 bit)
- Sound of the Yamaha C7 Concert Grand
- Multiple presets
- Reverb Control
- 18 seconds of limited note duration.
More Info / Download: Piano One
6.SampleScience – Room Piano V3
This free piano VST is the new version of the older free ones. It is perfect for creating lo-fi and hip-hop beats as the sound it
The user interface has greatly improved from the older versions. I like the new sleek design it has and the new features it comes with.
Features:
- Light-Weight Piano with a size of 60 MB
- ADSR
- LFO Controls
- Filter (Low/High)
- Room Reverb
- 64-bit Windows
Note: This plugin is only available for Windows 64bit.
Audio Demo:
More info/ Download: Room Piano V3
7.Salamander Piano
Salamander Piano is a free piano VST that is developed by bigcat instruments. Even though it’s a pretty lightweight piano instrument it can cut right through your mix and sound great.
Salamander Piano is one of the most popular stand-alone plugins. It can work perfectly for pop and rock genre. Of course you can make it work on any genre you like.
Sampled from the Yamaha C4 Grand Piano, it has a very warm low end that gives a pretty cool vibe. Not every free plugin has a pretty good low end like this one does.
Demo:
More Info/ Download: Salamander Piano
8.DSK The Grand
DSK The Grand is a free Grand Piano VST Plugin that sounds decent and you can use this on your songs. Especially if you like to layers some pianos on your song this is great.
DSK The Grand Features:=
- ADSR Envelope Controls
- Reverb Controls
- Four Velocity Layers
- Available for both Windows OS & Mac OS
Demo:
More Info / Download: DSK The Grand
9.Soft Piano – Spitfire LABS
Spitfire LABS if you don’t know, they have wide variety of instruments and almost all of them sound world-class.
This piano as the name suggests it sounds pretty soft and if you looking for a piano that has this sound then you will love it.
If you are making an emotional piano song then this would be perfect for it. You do need to download their plugin engine which is free to run the soft piano.
Demo:
More Info / Download: Soft Piano
10.RDG Audio – Free Piano
This free piano VST is recorded with 4 microphones and has a pretty realistic sound to it. The plugin is available for macOS and Windows.
The cool feature this plugin has are staccato, sustain, and reverb. You are also presented with an option to add complimentary strings on top of the piano sounds.
Demo:
More Info/ Download: Free Piano
11.Upright Piano
Upright piano is developed by 99sounds and it’s a fairly light weighted plugin with minimalist user interface.
Even though its a free plugin with not that modern GUI. the sound that comes out this is very clean and has perfect quality for a free piano VST.
Features 4 sampled notes for every octave and has 6 dynamic layers per note. Has the regular ADSR controls and a built in reverb.
Demo:
More Info / Download: Upright Piano
12.DSK AkoustiK KeyZ
DSK AkoustiK KeyZ is a free piano VST that has 3 types of pianos and they are Grand Piano, Concert piano P & Concert Piano F.
The grand piano specifically gives me a pretty vintage kinda sound that is very impressive for a free VST piano. Comes with the ADSR controls, flanger, filters, and reverb.
DSK plugins are usually pretty lightweight and very mild on your CPU. You can use them for piano melodies or chord progression on a large song and CPU will still be fine.
Demo:
More info / Download: DSK AkoustiK KeyZ