Dussek

About Dussek

Dussek is a free instrument for Windows, macOS and Linux that models pianos, harpsichords, a clavichord, harps, guitars, zithers and mallet percussion in real time, as an LV2, CLAP and VST3 plugin plus a standalone app. Nothing in it is a recording: the engine simulates the hammer, plectrum or mallet, the strings, the soundboard, the dampers and the pedals, with each instrument's parameters measured from freely licensed recordings of a real one.

The download holds 41 instruments: nine grand pianos, four upright pianos, six harpsichords, a clavichord, two harps, a guitar and strumstick, a psaltery and dan tranh, plus vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, balafon, bells, glockenspiels, hand chimes, tongue drum and three thumb pianos. Because every instrument is numbers rather than audio, the whole download is 30 to 45 MB.

It responds continuously to velocity with fast repetition, half-pedalling and sympathetic resonance, and reads tunings from Scala files. The code is AGPL-3.0-or-later and each instrument's samples are CC BY or CC BY-SA 4.0; the macOS build is Apple Silicon only and, like the Windows build, isn't signed by a registered developer.