The story
Popping in one day last week to my deserted, locked-down school to pick up a few things from my office, I put my head around the door to our main school hall, and there, in the middle of the stage, in near darkness, stood our beautiful Steinway concert grand, unloved, and unplayed for months. I thought it might be fitting to try to create a thing of beauty from such a sad sight.
St. Helen’s Steinway Pad was made by recording middle c and the octaves above and below it in a random sequence with the only recorder I had on hand – an Olympus LS-5 digital dictaphone. I then fed the whole 72 second recording through Valhalla’s Supermassive plugin and Arturia’s tape delay and captured the 100% wet output.
The resulting instrument, with a super-slow attack and release, undulates and evolves due to the octaves in the original recording, and provides a dreamy, airy texture, a promise of when the hall will once again soon be filled with music and joy.
Reviews for St. Helen’s Steinway Pad
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Muy Inspirador
Me ha servido para hacer un precioso colchón sonoro para ambientar una escena de una catedral. Gracias!
Beautifully warm, dream like sound pad
So beautiful, so inspiring. I would play this for a long time. Nicely evolving warm textured pad is my favorite kind of library. It would have been better to have some GUI.
A nice atmospheric pad
This library evokes feelings of the afterlife with it's ethereal quality. Well done.
All it needs is a GUI...
I really like the flowing and almost choir type sounds that this instrument makes. I will say that these types of sounds have been done a lot, so it often comes down to the GUI and usability of a instrument to make it stand out from the rest. Unfortunately, this one doesn't have much in the way of a GUI or customizability. Adding those things would really help take it to the next level.
Beautiful choir like pad
This is a super beautiful choir like pad. The attack and release are both really really long, and the attack of the low notes is even longer than those of the high notes. This last problem is solved very easily by changing the source from DFD to Time Machine Pro within Kontakt. This corrects the problem other users have run into where the high notes evolve really quickly and the low ones are much slower. The super long attack is something you're going to have to live with. You either love it or you hate it. In this case, I really love it. It's one of the most beautiful pads I've heard on PB. Excellent work!
