The story

Having stumbled upon Pianobook, I was keen to try my hand at sampling. The idea for this pad started when walking through Bellbird Park in Melbourne, listening to the thousands of fruit bats living in the trees. I recorded the bats, then stretched and distorted them into a gnarly audio soup. A second layer of eBow, piano, analogue synths, old Casio strings and whatever else I could find was then added to create a rich, organic and evolving pad sound. To teach myself Kontakt, I added a button to turn off/on the ‘bats’ layer and the ability to dial in as much or as little reverb as you wish. There’s a healthy dose of lower mids but I wanted to keep the sound as naked as possible, so you can dress it however you please. Enjoy!

Reviews for Pandemic Pad

  • Sound
  • Character
  • Playability
  • Inspiration
  • GUI

Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!

  • Cinematic strings pad... with bats?

    This patch is a very simple yet effective pad that features mostly a strings that I am sure you will like. The quality is really good and the default envelope seems just right for me. I gotta say that the Bats addition is cool, but unfortunately it might be completely unnoticed since the volume of the additional sound is incredibly low. It would be a nice option if there was a volume instead of a button, so you can mix the two sounds together. The included Reverb effect is minimal too, and it will also increase the loudness by quite a bit, so keep that in mind.

    Alex Raptakis31 October 2021
  • Most realistic synth strings ive heard

    Unless I'm mistaken there are so real strings used to make up this sound. Thats really amazing to me because it almost sounds completely realistic. Its silky and smooth and honestly sounds more organic than synth like. It has great dynamics controls too. The GUI is nice but as mentioned by others i wish we could adjust the volume of the bats because they're extremely low. Still i think this should be a go to patch for synth strings for anybody.

    septemberwalk09 November 2021
  • Simple but usable pad... with bats

    This GUI strikes you right off the bat as having class and style. Very nice! It would have been even better if there was a way to balance the level of bats vs. the pad. I was left wishing I could just hear the bats so I'd know what was going on there. Even so, it's a well recorded and edited sound which i'm sure will be useful to many people on the PB website.

    Sam EcoffSamplist 28 October 2021