Asking for recommendations: best VI for atmospheric pads

[Sascha Franck]

Pretty much any "bigger" synth plugin will give you a plethora of great pad sounds.
Personally, I really dig Zebra 2, and in case you purchase it now, you'll also get all professional presets sold through U-He added for free - and there's a truckload of great pads among them.

Others than that, I often prefer to use whatever sort of simpler synths and just send them through Valhalla Supermassive (which is free).

 

[Sascha Franck]

Btw, what kinda pads are you after? Like those really larger than life "hold one key and there's your movie score" ones?

 

[TheTrueZoltan!]

Btw, what kinda pads are you after? Like those really larger than life "hold one key and there's your movie score" ones?

I like pads that are based on string & choir sounds. Omnisphere really has some amazing presets to offer, although a lot of them are a little bit too dense and don‘t work that well with heavy guitars. I bought some sample libraries last week and begin to prefer sampled choirs and strings over synthetically generated pads. The first chord I played through Chris Hein Strings gave me goosebumps.

 

[TheTrueZoltan!]

I just bought Pigments 6 and a couple of preset packs. Some really nice sounds in there!

But... I downloaded the Korg Collection 6 demo today. The Trinity plugin immediately felt sooo familiar :-0 I used to have a Trinity myself and simply love its 'sparkly' pad sounds. I can scroll through thousands of presets from other more modern and ‘better’ software synths, and there are always a few nice sounds to be found, but as soon as I loaded up the Trinity plugin and played the first chord... yeah, this is just it.

 

[Sascha Franck]

@TheTrueZoltan!, as you're a Logic user, have you ever tried rolling your own stuff with the EXS (err, it's now just "Sampler")?
Once you go the hang of it you can do marvelleous things quite easily.