500 Free Industrial Samples from SampleRadar

SampleRadar has released a collection of 500 loops and sounds aimed at creating edgier styles of music.

GO GET THEM!

[via Bedroom Producers Blog]

Create New Rhythms Instantly in Stylus RMX

Spectrasonics's Stylus Rmx is a great piece of software for all things rhythm-oriented. It's a great way of centralizing your drum loops in a single place where you can experiment with layering, effects, and even the structure of the loops themselves. In the latest version, they added some great new features that allow you to produce instant variations on any loop to expand your options still further.

But, before this feature was added, I liked to experiment by triggering one loop's slices from another loop's MIDI file. This is kind of a variation on a trick I know a lot of fellow musicians used to do back in the day of hardware samplers. Just for the hell of it, I'd occasionally load up the sequences for a song, and then load in the wrong samples for each track to see if anything interesting came out of it. A lot of times it was garbage, but quite a few times it also produced something cool and unexpected. Here's how to do it in Stylus.

1. Open up an instance of Stylus RMX and select a loop.

2. Drag that loop from the MIDI file drag and drop window (the little blue box with the name of the loop in it) and drag the MIDI file from Stylus's interface to the software instrument track Stylus is assigned to in your DAW. This creates a MIDI file that will trigger the slices of your selected loop. As you can imagine, this gives you more flexibility with loops and allows you to actually edit them to your heart's content. But we're not interested in that for now. Hit play in your DAW and you should hear your loop play as expected.

3. Now, select another random loop in Stylus and hit play again. Stylus will trigger the slices from your newly-selected loop with the MIDI from the first loop you chose. You can keep selecting new loops until you find something interesting. Because every loop will have slices of varying lengths, often the results are very strange and off-kilter - perfect for IDM stuff. Some results will be more musically coherent than others, but remember if you get something that's cool, but not quite there yet, you can move notes around in the MIDI file using the piano roll editor in your DAW.

The more loops you have, the more variations and happy accidents await you!

Scrubbing for Sounds

When Radiohead's Kid A came out, there was a lot of speculation on various recording forums as to how they created the odd, glitchy vocal drone of Thom Yorke's voice at the beginning of "Everything In Its Right Place". As it turns out, it was created using the scrubbing function in ProTools.

If you're unfamiliar with the term, scrubbing is the ability to play audio by dragging the playhead across a file in real time. It's a bit like fast forwarding or rewinding tape with the play head engaged. It's useful mainly for finding specific portions of an audio file, but it also opens the door to some interesting sounds if you have the patience to work with it. Everything from 'record spin-down' and scratching effects, to grainy digital drones and alien soundscapes are possible. Here's how to do it in Logic.

1. Load up some audio and place it on the arrange page. Any audio will do, but obviously the source material will make a difference in the timbre of the sounds you can get out of it.

2. Although not required, it's a good idea to zoom in a bit so you can scrub smaller portions of audio at a time.

3. Press the PAUSE button on the transport at the bottom of the arrange page.

4. Using the little green triangle at the top of the playhead, slowly drag the playhead back and forth over the sound file. Note how dragging at different speeds slows down or speeds up the audio. You can set maximum scrub speed and scrub response to taste under the AUDIO PREFERENCES.

If you decide there are some interesting sound design options for you here, you'll then need to use a program like Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro to record the output for further editing and sampling. Note too that any effects assigned to the track you are scrubbing will play back when you scrub as well, but only for as long as you are holding down the mouse over the playhead . Like most unconventional sound design techniques, experimentation here is the key. Not everything will sound great, but sooner or later you are bound to come up with something useful.

Primeloops Releases Sample Set by Cyberworm

Since I link to his free sample sets frequently, I thought I would post this update from Cyberworm's blog regarding a commercial soundset of his samples..

"Crash-landing from the furthest reaches of the sonic hemisphere, Breakbeat Electronica is born! Brand new for our eagerly anticipated Fusion Series, and bursting with crystal-coated future grooves, this exciting new sound suite is alive, delivering driving rhythmical pulses hell bent on terrorising normal civilians on a direct route for the clubs!

Breakbeat Electronica is a highly addictive digitized mashup to assault the senses - mixing the hottest genres head on to battle it out: Electro vs. Breakbeat, Minimal vs. House & Glitch vs. Tech! For the first time you can experience a refreshing palette of distinctive grooves with a DJ-Ready collection combining the Filthiest Electronic Breakbeats with ultra-synthesised Minimal-Tech beats, upfront Dirty Electro Breaks with precision glitched out rhythms, Jackin’ Tech-Grooves with Sexy Texturised vibrations, presented in over 70 purified drum loops each one boasting endless creative possibilities for a streamline song-writing package.

If you are easily offended you may want to look away as this release throws you into a deep pool of razor-sharp grooves expertly and unrequitedly optimised, shock-proof tested and fit for only those who possess the utmost genre-defying style! Inject Breakbeat Electronica into your mix for immediate results and maximum originality.

Listen demo and buy..."

Free Drum Loops

Well.. kinda. Rekkerd.org has a ton of free loops in a pretty wide variety of styles, If you like them, you might want to throw a donation their way.

Grab You Some Loops, Son!