“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” SampleSet.                    

The SampleSet contains 867 24bit WAV files.
16 programs for all versions of Steinberg HALion
16 programs for Logic EXS24
16 programs for NI Kontakt v1 and v2
2 program for NI Kontakt v3 and v4

Surmandal Plectrum
The “Surmandal” programs are the plectrum picked Surmandal from C1 to G4 with all notes and half notes sampled. The mappings are E2 to 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 ten generally accepted Thaats, all included in the Indian Surmandal SampleSet:
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.


All formats are included when you buy “Indian Surmandal” so you can download whatever format you like or all of them.

(Full version of Kontakt is required, this library does NOT work with the free Kontakt Player!)



For details about the Indian Surmandal download the PDF here.