Review: Pandrum by Cinematique Instruments

Cinematique Instruments’ Pandrum provides a joy-inspiring collection of eight pan and tongue drums with five texture layers. Pandrum is not only for the composer, but also for the performer, with intuitive settings for both the studio and the stage.

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Review: Pandrum by Cinematique Instruments

Cinematique Instruments’ Pandrum brings the relaxing and meditative sound of the pan drum family to the digital audio workstation. Smartly sampled, Pandrum transports the sound of these expensive and hard-to-acquire instruments of limited tonality into a rich and nuanced set of fully-chromatic instruments and patches.

Pandrum sells for €110 from Cinematique Instruments

Thoughts

First introduced in the early 2000s, the original Hang was created in Switzerland, and instruments inspired by it have since sprung up internationally. In essence similar to the steel pan drums of the Caribbean, the hand pan family consists of two metal half-shells (though convex, not concave), one of which has been hammered into seven or more ‘tone fields’ which are played manually. These tone fields, themselves rich in harmonic overtones, are often arranged into an ‘ethnic scale’. A variant of the hand pan, often called ‘steel tongue drum’ or ‘tank drum’, substitutes the tone fields for tongues, and can be played manually or with mallets.
Since each hand pan and tank drum must be made and tuned laboriously by hand by a skilled artisan, prices are rather high and supply is very limited. Not only does this mean that each instrument is unique in its sound, but also that a single drum will have a single tonality, both in key center and in achievable relative intervallic relationships. Just like brass players 400 years ago had to switch instruments to play in a different key, there is a relationship of one drum to one performative context.
To simplify things, Cinematique Instruments has collected and sampled a number of such pan and tank drums to be used as each composition or performance demands. Let’s dive in.

The UI has the same modern, clean look that defines the Cinematique Instruments oeuvre. Upon initialization, the user is presented with this:

There are three layers to this UI. At the top is the preset name and selector arrows. In the middle are the selectors for Layer, Hand Pan, and Scale. Finally, at the bottom are the effects: ADSR, Delay, Reverb (highlighted here, since it is active), EQ, and FX.
Preset name and selector arrows: Cinematique Instruments has provided six presets, of which they state ‘each…stands for a different way of playing the Pandrum’. Indeed, there is little overlap between presets, each one providing a bespoke blend of effects, main drum, and layer element, from which building a unique sound with further customization should prove easy. If I could change one thing about this section, though, I would have preferred Snapshots, separate NKI patches, or even the ability to assign a MIDI CC to the selectors in order to navigate the presets, rather than only a UI menu which can only be sequentially clicked through.

Clicking on the yellow Layer name brings up the Layer menu page:

Layers include a simple guitar, a Gamelan quasi-vibraphone, guitar harmonics, a salad bowl, and an upright Y piano. Each adds a nice, but different, tonal transient to the complexities of the hand drum timbre, centering the sound in pleasant ways. A Layer (including ‘No Layer’) can be selected from this page, but if you wish to not make a selection, simply click outside the available options to reach the main UI page again. Again, if I could change one thing about this section, I would have liked a more granular or adaptive means of Layer selection than clicking through a UI menu.

From the main UI page, you can control the relative volume level of the Layer via a knob surrounding the Layer instrument’s icon:

Clicking on the yellow Hand Pan name brings up the Hand Pan menu page:

There are a number of possibilities here! There are eight drums, two of which have alternate versions (including one ‘Percussion’), and of course a ‘No Pan’ option if you just want to play the Layer by itself. Each option sounds completely different to the next; words fail the timbral complexities afforded here, so I highly recommend listening to the attached walkthrough video. Although this family of instruments is traditionally tied to a certain tonality, thanks to the magic of sampling Cinematique Instruments has made each option fully chromatic through three-and-a-half octaves. Options include: Aqua Drum (tongue drum with hands), Camenzind (pan drum with hands), Leaf (pan drum with hands), Orbi Drum (pan drum with hands and with mallets), Pan Art (pan drum with hands), Rav Vast (tongue drum with hands), Tiflis (pan with hands), and Zephyr (pan with hands and percussive). All were recorded in several dynamic layers in eight round-robins. Yet again, if I could change one thing about this section, I would have liked a more granular or adaptive means of Hand Pan selection than clicking through a UI menu.

One final nice touch from the main UI page is the faint lines dividing the Layer, Hand Pan, and Scale sections are functional, too: they reflect the stereo levels during performance!

Clicking on the yellow Scale name brings up the Scale menu page:

As you can see, the default is ‘keyboard’, which is explicitly obvious in its use-case. This three-and-a-half-octave chromatic range allows for a number of interesting melodic and harmonic possibilities while composing.

However, just below is where things get really interesting. A number of world scales common to pan drums are included: Raga Desh, Insen, Dorian, Akebono, Equinox, Integral, Aeolian, La Sirena, Celtic Minor, Ysah Savita, Amara, Hijaz, Anahata, Myxolydian, Kurd, Oxalis, and Aegean. There is even an option to build your own custom scale! On a keyboard controller, these 9-pitch scales rise from middle C (C3) to A-flat3, with A3 and B-flat3 being drum-body percussive sounds.

However, Cinematique Instruments has really provided these scales for performative use with a percussive MIDI controller—in particular, they recommend the WavePan Controller made by Stefan Christ—though any drum pad with enough sensors should be sufficient in theory.

As with the previous two sections, you get a goodie from the main UI page. For non-‘keyboard’ scales you can choose the root via a click on the relevant icon:

Once more, if I could change one thing about this section, I would have liked a more granular or adaptive means of selection than clicking through a UI menu, but for scales in particular this is not as big of a deal.

Finally, the effects on the bottom row are very straightforward. From left to right, the ADSR icon opens a small menu to control Attack, Decay, and Compression for each; the Delay icon opens a small menu to control (musical) Time, Volume, and Feedback; the Reverb icon opens a smell menu to control Type, Volume, and a Lowpass filter; the EQ icon opens a small menu to control a single Gain bell at a Frequency, as well as a separate Lowpass filter, and the FX icon opens a small menu to enable and control the amounts of Rotary, Cabinet, Drive, and Tremolo effects. To make any finer adjustments (such as to the Q of the EQ bell or the speed of the Tremolo), simply click the wrench at the top-left of the patch window. And: each effect parameter is assignable to a MIDI CC!

All in all, Pandrum is not only cute and fun, but a fine virtual replacement for the instruments it has sampled. What it lacks in tangibility it makes up for in affordability and flexibility. Fair warning: it’s easy to lose hours if you want to just open it up and poke around.

Facts

2158 samples, 1.62 GB. Requires full Kontakt 5.6.8 or higher.

Pandrum sells for €110 from Cinematique Instruments

Demos of Pandrum by Cinematique Instruments

Videos of Pandrum by Cinematique Instruments

Contributor Kent Kercher reviews Pandrum by Cinematique Instruments
“Cinematique Instruments’s Pandrum provides a joy-inspiring collection of eight pan and tongue drums and five texture layers. Pandrum is not only for the composer, but also for the performer, with intuitive settings for both the studio and the stage.”