The story
The goal for this library was to provide some nice complementing sounds for one of my other libraries – FlowPiano, while also being substantial enough to make for a good collection on it’s own.
The pads are divided into 4 categories: Ethereal, Organic, Synth and Textures. The Ethereal pads are made from a synth base with further processing in paulstretch. The Organic category is based on organic sources, e.g. violin, clarinet and my voice. The Synth sounds are sampled from presets I made with Vital and Serum. Lastly, the Textures are made by “blurring” foley recordings, which is based on convolution processing.
I hope you enjoy this library as much as I did making it!
Update 1.1:
Added an Envelope/ADSR
Added a layer select menu
Added customisable effects
Interface
Reviews for FlowPads
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Handy pad toolbox
Nice job - this is a small but perfectly formed selection of pads of four very different yet complimentary styles. The UI is absolutely straightforward and it's really easy to play.
The textures in particular are really different and I could see them being super useful for sound design or perhaps a lo-fi composition.
Great work and thanks for sharing.Excellent Pad Collection
First of all, I was really surprised by the large amount of content in this library. There are 25 patches in total split into four different categories: Ethereal, Organic, Synth and Textures. All of these pads are really beautiful and I couldn't find a single preset that I didn't like. I especially love the Ethereal and Organic pads, but all of them are great. The GUI is nice and simple with just two available effects. Each patch has a reverb control, but the different categories comes with either a delay, distortion, or flanger effect. The mod wheel is also connected to a low pass filter, which is a feature I always like to have in a pad library. Overall this is a well executed stellar package!
Lots to explore!
Even though this quite diverse library comes in just under 100MB in total size, it packs some serious diverse and unique sounding patches across all categories. From big lush syth pads to some amazing textured ambient instruments, the user has a lot of stuff to explore and to be amazed by.
On top of that, the nice, sleek and minimal looking GUI design has two options per patch, one being a Reverb, and one that changes depending on the patch you will go with. It can either be a Delay, a Distortion or a Phaser effect!
Due to the pad-like nature of the instruments, I'd really want to see an Attack and Release setting right on the GUI, but everything is made in a way that you can easily adjust the envelope via the Kontakt's Edit Mode on each patch (Wrench icon on the top left of each patch window).
As a tip, be sure to combine two (or more!) patches together, to achieve even bigger and even more unique sounds!
A Bit Of A Stretch
While I don't like to be too critical about free instruments , I do feel less is often more in terms of usefulness. Here we have some 25 pads that offer a single sample each stretched across the keyboard with controls for reverb and distortion. While most are usable as basic backdrops for underscore especially the organic selection, they all feature that tell-tale sound of kontakt stretching and ultimately leave me unsatisfied. I wonder wether a smaller set of more impressive pads could have been presented by layering the samples and adding a little in built modulation. The fact that the GUI is almost award winningly simple, attractive and usable makes the pads themselves seem even more pedestrian.
Edit: The 1.1 version of this instrument is great fun to play around as it alllows the user to select from a drop down and mix three samples together. It is great for creating atmospheres and even percussive elements as well as pads and the sounds mix well together and impress more than they did in isolation.Thumbs up for the update.
A nice set of useable pads
I love pads,sometimes you need some nice pads that do not stand out too much.So this is a good collection,I like them all.
Seem to me that the organic pad 7 is a semitone to high,but it's an easy fix in kontakt,just set the root key to c3 and save.then ur good to go.
Nice work Lukemans
