The Crow Hill Company’s latest creation promises to be the most original sound set they’ve produced to date, and has been created using techniques the team discovered when developing their Crystal Pads library. Bringing together an array of “microtonal, stammering, stuttering, strangulated tones”, Brackish Pads is said to be best suited to heartbreaking, tragic and profound music. 

During the process of making Crystal Pads, the company say they found that the unpredictable modulation they were applying to notes started creating random arpeggiated sounds. As a result, they set about purposely recreating the effect, expanding on their original ideas and putting together a collection of new sounds that are referred to in Brackish Pads as Critters. The set of Critters deliver an assortment of “endless evolving textures”, while the instrument comes equipped with tools that allow users to shape their tone in real time. 

The company say that they take issue with ‘set and forget’ GUIs, preferring instead to develop instruments that actively encourage tweaking and detailed automation. As such, Brackish Pads’ interface brings together all of the instruments parameters, placing them within easy reach and allowing them to be mapped to MIDI controllers. A set of macro effects are present, providing users with the following built-in effects:

• Cassette: a tape emulation.
• Delay: a tempo-sync’ed delay.
• Hugeverb: a reverb with a long decay.
• Pump: Side-chained ‘pumping’ compression.

The Crow Hill Company have stated that they’re well aware the library may not appeal to everyone — take a look and listen to the below walkthrough and see what you think!

Video of Brackish Pads WALKTHROUGH

Brackish Pads is supported on PCs running Windows 10 and above, and Macs running macOS 11 or higher. VST2, VST3, AU and AAX plug-in versions are available. 

Brackish Pads is available now, priced at £29 including VAT.

thecrowhillcompany.com/tools/brackish-pads