Thenatan Tape Piano 2 Review
Overview
Total Rating: 4.5/5
To cut to the chase, Thenatan Tape Piano 2 is an outstanding plugin but it isn’t completely flawless. There are a few performance issues which we will get into that might burden a more lightweight system. Outside of this, TP2 is an amazing plugin with outrageous sound design capability suitable for any genre but especially Lofi, Ambient, & Cinematic.
I love it so much I even designed my own Preset Pack for it. If you want to purchase Tape Piano 2, you can pick it up from from my affiliate link in the button below. For $30 this thing is a huge value!
Watch my review video
My Review Process
We’re going to run through my five point review which is based on a 5 black key system. I take the 5 black keys in an octave range on a piano and turn those notes into categories:
Affordability
Competitiveness in the market
Design
Functionality
Grooviness
Each category can earn 0, half, or a full black key with the maximum score being 5 black keys.
This will be a rather in depth review. The entire point of my review process is to serve as a singular video to highlight everything plugins are doing right and wrong so you can just watch one video and make an extremely informed buying decision.
First Impressions
I have to admit this upfront before I get into this review. I downloaded Tape Piano 2 when it was on sale for $10. It caught my eye because it was a well designed plugin and looked like it had a lot of sound design capability but when I was watching other videos about it, I was completely unimpressed by the sounds I was hearing despite reviewers talking about how great this thing is.
There was a strange dissonance between what I was seeing in plugin capability vs how it sounded so I sort of just figured that maybe these reviewers were just using it wrong.
Then I bought just as a gamble and sure enough, when I was running through all the presets most of them in my opinion sounded really bad. Often they had a compressor on them that was doing way too much work and they were peaking the levels within the plugin itself.
Not only that but I was running into massive performance issues where every preset was sucking up my entire CPU load. I was so frustrated and put off by the presets that I actually almost just uninstalled the plugin.
But then I remembered why I bought this plugin. I didn’t get this to just get another set of presets on another synth plugin. I bought this because I saw the potential it had from a sound design aspect and I started designing my own presets from scratch. And my mood on Tape Piano shifted so drastically.
I suddenly found myself immersed in a design plugin where I could make full and wide ambient piano sounds while also being able to make the fattest, nastiest bass sounds. I’d find myself designing a preset then getting lost in an inspired 15 minute sonata. And I fell in love with this thing.
I ended up designing 50 presets and now have that pack for sale for only $5 on my store. So if you end up deciding to buy this plugin, I’d highly recommend it as an expansion to get more out of this thing. Every time I use Tape Piano, I only use my presets. (Of course I’m a little biased 😉)
Now onto the cateogories!
DESIGN
I always like to start with design since this is the first thing we see and I can walk you through the different sections we’re working with.
There is no doubt Tape Piano 2 is a beautifully designed plugin. Thenatan really took the time to make this thing super well polished with very clean vector based graphics, a scalable GUI, realtime waveform animation, and an organized interface.
All of the macro modulation possibilities for TP2
The manual is also very well designed as well with really simple graphics and layout. I do wish they broke into more detail about what things do, I’m a fan of in-depth explainer instruction manuals that go into detail. The manual is great for telling you what things are but a better explanation of things like the filters or what exactly the robot slider does would be nice.
At the end of the day, there are a lot of out of date looking plugins and being a designer myself I really appreciate when developers take the time to make a good looking plugin.
Overall this gets 1 Black Key for design.
FUNCTIONALITY
Moving onto functionality, this is where things get a little more tricky. As I mentioned earlier, I initially had some massive performance issues running only 1 instance of Tape Piano 2 in my DAW. This was fixed in 2 ways, one was to increase my buffer size (typically I run this really low) and the other was to enable the GPU option in the settings. This seemed to fix this out of the gate. I don’t like that I had to change my buffer size to use a plugin, but given that Tape Piano samples 5 sounds at once, applies on board effects and macros, has a scratch designer, and filters I can see why it needs a bit more juice.
Given the amount of capability we’re dealing with here this is a bit of a wash.
Otherwise everything on here functions relatively smoothly but I did find a few glitches that occur. These issues are better outlined in the video but can all easily be fixed with updates in the future. These are little quirks that sort of add to a unique level in a sense but it would also be nice if these were just smoothed out a little bit.
Another huge gripe is the fact that most of the factory presets clip just within the plugin itself. They’re turned up WAY too loud! These can be fixed by just rolling back the output and the compressor but you shouldn’t have to do that for a factory preset.
But all is not lost because the capabilities of Tape Piano are enormous and the amount of modulation, effect, and sound design options make this thing SO amazing!
If you want to see some ideas of just how amazing you can sound design in Tape Piano 2, check out this live stream I did as I was making my preset pack. This is a 4 hour stream but you can just skip around and get a gist of what I’m doing.
So all said in done, we’ll give this only half a black key for Functionality.
COMPETITIVENESS
I searched for other plugins that compete with Thenatan’s Tape Piano 2 but I really couldn’t find anything. However here are some of the closest comparisons I could find:
WavesFactory Tape Piano - $60
This is twice as much as Thenatan’s Tape Piano 2 and also doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of sound design capability. But it’s another lofi, tape piano-type plugin.
XLN RC-20 - $99
This isn’t really an instrument but since Thenatan put’s Tape Piano 2 into the lofi category, it’s worth mentioning RC-20. This is a lofi effect rack that can be added after any sound (VST or audio) and allows you to add damage to the signal that creates really nice old, vintage sound. If lofi is what you seek and you don’t care how you get there, RC-20 is a great route.
Thenatan Vybz - $30
Keeping it in the same brand as Tape Piano 2, Thenatan also makes an effects plugin called Vybz. This is the same concept as RC-20 except it’s a third the price. Granted this is much newer and less proven than RC-20. But still a feature packed effect rack you can add to any track to get some great damage!
Cherry Audio Quadra - $39
This is a bit different but worth mentioning. Cherry Audio’s Quadra is based on an old analog synth. It isn’t really advertised as a lofi plugin however it does perform a similar function as Tape Piano where it has 4 sound sources that you can modify to create a huge, epic sound. But this is just a synthesizer and doesn’t contain the diverse sample library that Tape Piano 2 boasts.
I haven’t seen much that is quite like Tape Piano 2. It isn’t like a normal synth or instrument VST and due to this uniqueness, I give it a full black key for Competitiveness.
AFFORDABILITY
In line with competitiveness, I scooped up Tape Piano 2 for $10. I’m pretty sure I had seen it at this price numerous times before I bought it and once that sale disappeared it went up to $30. Regardless even that is very affordable for any instrument plugin but given that you get SO MUCH capability out of even a $30 plugin.
I give this a full black key for affordability.
GROOVINESS
The best and most important category, grooviness!
As I mentioned before the factory presets are very mediocre and many are too loud to use without first adjusting some levels.
Hopefully in the future these will be updated to not be wonky, but generally speaking you shouldn’t buy plugins just for presets. If you pay for a new instrument you should learn everything about it and make your own sounds to get the most out of it and not rely on the factory bank. Plus that’s just way more satisfying.
(And that’s why I made 50 of my own presets)
It’s hard to explain how amazing this VST sounds without you listening so I recommend listening to the videos I’ve embedded in this review so you can hear for yourself how amazing Tape Piano 2 sounds.
Awesome sound, hands down 1 black key for Grooviness.
FX section of TP2 (2 deactivated modules are Delay and Phaser)
THE VERDICT
In the end, Tape Piano adds up to getting 4.5 black keys out of 5.
Some of the gripes I mentioned can easily be fixed with an update but aside from that, Tape Piano 2 boasts huge sound and that can be crafted to your liking.
I also talked with the developer Natan of Tape Piano 2 during one of my live streams and he is aware of the bugs and is working to fix them. I also threw in some feature requests I hope to see in future updates such as keyboard splits to only trigger sounds in certain key ranges, individual FX sends for each samples, and a few other fun features.