FANTASTiC | 16 June 2016 | 1.87 GB

“Surmandal” also known as “Swarmandal” is a small Indian harp. It is generally used to accompany vocalists playing arpeggios and notes with the right thumb in Hindustani Classical music. The Surmandal was used in The Beatles songs “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “Within You Without You”, plucked with a guitar pick like we have done here with the Indian Surmandal sample library.

Surmandal Plectrum

The “Surmandal” programs are the plectrum picked Surmandal from C1-G4 with all notes and half notes sampled. The mappings are E2-G5, the G5 is stretched to C6 and E2 is stretched down to C2. Every note has been sampled in 4 velocity layers and has 4 samples for every layer, these have been programmed as “round robin” for the Kontakt and EXS24 programs. The HALion programs have all samples mapped as velocity layers instead, a total of 16 velocity layers.

Surmandal Thaats

A Thaat is a musical mode in Hindustani music which always has seven notes (excluding the repeated tonic) and is considered the basis for the system of organizing and classifying ragas in North Indian classical music.

There are 10 generally accepted Thaats, all included in the Indian Surmandal:

Bilawal, Khamaj, Kafi, Asavari, Bhairavi, Bhairav, Kalyan, Marwa, Purvi & Todi.

These are strummed up/down in different speeds and also clusters of notes for each Thaat.

Indian Surmandal contains:

867 24-bit stereo WAV files

2 programs for Kontakt 3+ with scripted interface

16 programs for Kontakt 1+

16 programs for EXS24

16 programs for HALion