A little while back, I posted an article on how to get new drum sounds using just your mouth, a mic, and some effects processing. Here's a kit I threw together using those principals. 27 sounds as 24-bit/44.1k mono WAV files.
GO GET IT!
Friday, July 9, 2010
Free Sample Friday: Mouth Drum Kit
A little while back, I posted an article on how to get new drum sounds using just your mouth, a mic, and some effects processing. Here's a kit I threw together using those principals. 27 sounds as 24-bit/44.1k mono WAV files.
GO GET IT!
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Spy on Erasure Making Their New Album
Vince Clarke has set up a webcam in his studio and has been uploading random shots for people wanting an inside look at the new album being made. Mostly it looks like two middle-aged guys drinking beer and staring at a computer screen. Should be interesting to see what future shots are like.
Wave Alchemy Releases Free TR-606 Sample Set
Fresh off from releasing their Drum Machines 02 sample library, Wave Alchemy has released a free sample set of the sounds of the Roland TR-606. The sounds were recorded and processed through all manner of outboard gear and assembled into 4 kits for Konakt 2/3/4, or Battery 3. The kits apparently make extensive use of multi-velocity sampling and round robin hits.
GO GET THEM!
Trent Reznor to be a Daddy
In an interview with WWD, Mariqueen Maandig, Trent Reznor's recent bride and musical partner in How to Destroy Angels confirms that the two are expecting their first child. Can you imagine having Trent Reznor be your dad? I bet their kids will turn out totally normal and boring.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Open Thread: Where Do You Find New Music?
So in our discussion of Prince's declaration of the Internet as being dead, I brought up that while I thought this was a preposterous statement, I did feel that the value of the internet for promotion was perhaps a bit overstated. A reader brought up the question about how people are finding out about new music these days and I thought this would make an excellent open thread.
As for me, I find new stuff mainly through friends with similar tastes (I have a lot of music geek friends, so it helps), through following the "Buyers Who Purchased This Item Also Bought This" links on iTunes, and through Pandora. What about you? What's your favorite way of finding new bands?
Review: Prime Loops Synth Bass Anthology
Library: Synth Bass Anthology
Format: Downloadable Kontakt, EXS24, Halion, NNXT, WAV, AIFF
Genre: Any Electronic Genre
Distributed by: Prime Loops
Price: £9.71
Demo: Audio demos on the product page.
Synth Bass Anthology is one of the latest offerings from sample developers Prime Loops. As the name suggests, it consists solely of synth bass sounds, although many of the sounds are useful outside that range as well. In total, there are a bit over 80 different multi-sampled synth basses here sourced from a handful of analog classics (Roland Juno-106, Roland MKS-30, Korg MonoPoly, Formanta Polyvox, and the Novation Super Bass Station).
The sounds can be mapped manually, or you can use any of the pre-mapped sample instruments for most of the popular sampler formats. I tested it in Logic's EXS-24. After installing the samples and the instrument files into their respective folders, I fired up Logic and started testing the sounds. Immediately, a small housekeeping problem came up. Several of the raw WAV files had identical names. They're in separate folders, so this doesn't present a problem in that respect, but EXS-24 looks for the source files by file name, and if it comes across two or more samples on your hard drive that have identical file names to the one it is trying to load, it has to ask you to select which one is the correct file. Not a HUGE deal, but pretty annoying (probably at least a third of the instruments use identically-named source files), and a problem that is easily avoidable by giving more distinct files names. Also notable is that the actual instrument settings (filters, envelopes, etc.) in EXS for all of these sounds are totally identical. I found the amp envelope they used with a bit of a release after it sort of inappropriate for a good number of sounds. Again, not an unforgivable sin given how inexpensive this collection is, but you should be aware of what you're getting.
So how about the sounds themselves? Most are really good. There's a pretty broad palette of sounds on offer here. You'll find trembling subs, growling sawtooths, funky/cheesey plucks, biting cross-mod, short and percussive or mellow and sustained. Each synth has a pretty distinctive character and this collection does a pretty decent job of representing that. I found the Polyvoks samples to be the most interesting and most overtly analog-sounding, but you'll find something to like among most of the synths represented here. Most of the sounds are quite simple and the sort of thing that anyone with a decent amount of synth programming experience could wrangle up on their own without too much trouble. I think the value of this collection is more in the individual characters of the synths themselves. Sure, you could program a similar sounding bass, but it's the differences in the oscillators, envelopes, filters, and output stages that really make these instruments sound the way they do.
Now I said that most of these sounds are really good. Unfortunately, there are quite a few sounds in this collection that suffer from noise problems. Obviously, as these are vintage instruments, one expects a little noise, but some of the Juno-106 samples (a notoriously noisy instrument, given) have more than I would consider acceptable from a commercial collection. In some instances, you can hear what sounds like a compressor slowly bringing up the noise floor at the end of the sample. Personally, I think noise and imperfection can be very interesting and are not things to necessarily be shunned, but even in a collection as cheap as this, I think people expect samples they are paying for to be cleanly recorded and produced. Again, just something to take into account.
That said, Prime Loops is currently asking for very little for this collection, so it's perhaps unfair to judge it as stringently as pricier collections. Realistically, I think most people know that not everything in a sample library is going to be usable for them personally. If you're looking for a way to add the character of some classic synths to your tracks, this collection definitely offers a very cheap way to do it. [7.5/10]
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Irony of Prince's "The Internet is Dead" Statement
In case you missed it, Prince announced that his new album would not be available digitally because "the Internet is dead". He goes on to compare it MTV; something that started off cool, but got so bastardized that it became unrecognizable and devoid of the appeal that made it a success in the first place.
As you can imagine, a bold statement like this sparked a lot of discussion on blogs and discussion forums, but there was one key point I haven't seen anyone address. The method Prince will be using to distribute his new album? It will be given away free with an issue of the tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror. A frigging NEWSPAPER - practically the most glaring example of an outdated form of communication and an industry that is almost universally failing and slowly dying out. And where are the newspapers that are failing headed to try and sustain their business? The Internet. Would you like some irony with your irony?
I will say this. The promise of the Internet as a promotional tool for bands has always been grossly overstated. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, collectively the poster children for the "we don't need labels anymore" movement are only able to do what they're doing because they've benefited from 20 years of major label money, advertising, and tour support. An occasional example like the Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen comes out of nowhere and gains a huge following thanks to the MySpace, but these are extremely rare exceptions to the rule. And lets face it... MySpace is a ghost town these days. It's basically become a place where people try to serial friend as many people as possible and then spam them with "buy my album" comments that pretty much everyone ignores.
This is the weakness of the Internet as a promotional medium. Since it takes virtually no money or effort, EVERYONE does it to the point that the signal to noise ratio is so poor as to make it hard for people to separate the wheat from the chaff and find stuff they'll like. These are issues that I suspect will be figured out eventually. Regardless of its present weaknesses, anyone who doesn't recognize digital distribution as the future of the music industry is either misinformed or simply delusional. Look, I'm in my late 30's. I grew up with vinyl, cassette, and CD. I love physical formats. But the writing is on the wall. The new generation prefers their music digitally, and if we as musicians want to sell our music, we need to cater to that.
Free Rare Drum Machine Samples from Pethu
Saw this over on VST Planet and thought I'd share it here:Pethu Music are giving away SpecDrum, a Kontakt 4 instrument/sample set of all 32 sounds available for the relatively rare Cheetah Specdrum. Pethu describes it thusly:
"The Cheetah SpecDrum was a poor man's Linn alternative - an 8-bit, 3-channel sample player that bolted onto the back of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer. Both sequencer program and drum samples had to fit in 48KB's of RAM, so no wonder long cymbal crashes are in short supply! Despite that, the sounds are surprisingly good."
GO GET THEM!
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