Info at the link...
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Review: Wave Alchemy Drum Machines 02
Library: Drum Machines 02
Format: Downloadable 24-bit WAVs with mapped instruments for popular soft samplers.
Genre: Any genre that need electronic drum sounds
Developers Site: Wave Alchemy
Distributed by: Loopmasters
Price: £24.95
Demo: On product page (A selection of free samples from the library are also available here)
Drum Machines 02 is the latest release from Wave Alchemy, a company quickly building a name for itself as the source for some of the best sounding electronic drum samples on the market. This library collects the company's previous micro packs of Roland TR-808, Roland, TR-909, and Drumfire DF2000, and adds samples sourced from an MFB Schlagzwerg. The sounds were recorded and processed through everything from hi-end pre-amps to vintage samplers and filters, so they don't require additional processing to sound great in a mix. But doesn't the world already have enough 808 and 909 samples?
It's true that there is no shortage of 808 and 909 samples out there. Other sample libraries, both free and commercial, have explored this territory many times over already. But while you've no doubt heard these famous drum machines countless times already, I'd wager that you've never heard them sound this good. Wave Alchemy is known for the production quality of their drum sounds and this is no exception. Kicks and snares sound impossible snappy and present. The cymbals are clear as a bell. The percussion punches through a mix perfectly. In addition to tweaking the settings on the drum machines to obtain different sounds, a really wide range of processing techniques were used here to stretch the boundaries of sounds you'd normally expect from these machines. The overdriven variations are especially nice with the perfect balance of hardness and warmth.
Wave Alchemy may have suspected that 808 and 909 samples, good as these are, might still be a tough sell, so they've wisely paired those two machines with sounds from a duo of less common drum machines: the Drumfire DF2000 and the MFB Schlagzwerg. Both of these machines can do some very similar sounds to the 808 and 909, but both also offer more extensive sound shaping parameters, so the sounds are a lot more varied, including some synthy FX and ring mod sounds. The sound of both the DrumFire and MFB units are unmistakeably analog and while these sounds mostly pale in comparison to the more iconic Roland drum machines, what is here is recorded and processed very well and offers an extended palette for those in the mood for something more synthy sounding.
As always, the sounds are divided up into sub folders by sound types making it quick to find the sounds you need. A handful of mapped out drum kits is included for the various soft sampelrs out there, but these don't include all the samples in the library, so if you want a "sound menu" type mapping of all the sounds, you'll need to take that on yourself. As a bonus, all of the samples are also available as professionally dithered 16-bit sample for those of you dinosaurs who still favor hardware samplers.
If you need some 808 and 909 samples, this is your library. I've literally never heard nicer samples of these machines and the processing is just jaw-dropping. The additional drum machines round things out nicely, and while they're not as inspiring as the Roland classics, they still sound great and give you an even wider range of sounds to choose from. [10/10]
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Mechanical Vocal Effects for Fun & Profit
The man vs. machine dichotomy is one that has long fascinated us. Its influence touched all aspects of society, but it seemed to especially catch fire in the musical community. In Britain, worried orchestral musicians protested synths, afraid - correctly, perhaps - that these new fangled instruments would replace them. Similarly, the widespread popularity of drum machines had a lot of skilled drummers feeling a bit nervous. But the electronic musicians embraced it to the point where it wasn't enough to simply utilize the machines - they wanted to become machines. From the cold, alienated sound of early Gary Numan, to the mechanical rhythms of Kraftwerk, the artists expressed this merging of man and machine in different ways, but one of the most common ways was to make use of studio tricks to take the human voice and strip away its humanity.
So today, I thought we'd look at some of the techniques, past and present, that can be used for this purpose.
• Crush them bits
Part of making a voice sound more robotic is making it sound as if it is coming from a speaker instead of a mouth. There are a number of ways of doing this, but I think a combination of a bit-crusher and amp simulator does the job nicely. The bit-rate on your bit crusher isn't important, the key is to downsample the sound quite a bit. On Logic's BitCrusher, try somewhere around 14x for some nice aliasing and metallic artifacts. The amp simulator helps to make this basic sound sound as if it is coming from an old speaker. You don't want a full blown Marshall shred setting, obviously, just something with some presence. Here's what it sounds like:
• Keep it old school
In the early days of hip-hop, up and coming musicians recorded in very basic studios and had to make the most of very limited set-ups. It's no secret that Kraftwerk was a huge influence on the early hip-hop records, but few of the artists could afford an actual vocoder to produce those robotic vocals. What a few of them did instead, was to set up a delay unit to extremely short settings, resulting in a rattling, metallic effect. Yeah, it didn't sound the same, but if it was good enough for Afrika Bambaataa, I say it's good enough for you. This effect can be a little trickier to pull off with a lot of modern delay plug-ins, because most of them are so oriented towards syncing to your sequencer. We need something with REALLY short delay times. I chose Logic's Modulation Delay. Your feedback should be set fairly high, and you want to make sure the delay times aren't being modulated... we want them constant. The end result should sound like this:
• Vocoders
Probably the most obvious choice for this type of effect. Fortunately, software vocoders are abundant these days and many of them are even free. I'm not going to go into the depth of how to use a vocoder here - read your damn manual. But be sure to experiment with different carrier sources. Especially mess around with using noise or amelodic samples/audio sources for a carrier for some unusual effects. Here's an example of the 'classic' vocoder sound:
• Put a ring on it
Ring Modulation offers a fairly wide range of unusual sounds when applied to the voice. The sound designers on the Star Wars movies employ this effect quite a bit both for robotic voices or to simulate far off transmissions. Applying a ring mod effect to your vocal recording opens the door to digital shrieks, harsh bit-crush type effects, and oddly mechanical timbres, so be sure to mess around with the settings. Often even a small tweak can result in quite a different effect. Here's just one example of the type of effects possible:
• Smack my pitch up
Pitch correction/auto-tune effects don't have to be used for evil. Instead of using them to suck the life out of some faceless diva's wailing, you can use them to transform a human voice into an unfeeling automaton. This technique is a bit more subtle than the others, so it'll sound better if you combine it with some of the above techniques. The key here is to remove as much of the variation in the voice. Celemony's Melodyne is great for this in that you can not only quantize the pitch, but you can draw out pitch variations and drift to get eerily emotionless sounding vocal treatments. Here, I've combined it with some subtle flanging with a high feedback level:
Adrenalinn Sync 2 Released
I neglected to mention last week that Roger Linn had teamed up with Way Out Ware to release a new version of Adrenalinn Sync, a plug-in specializing in rhythmic effects. You may recall that I wasn't nuts about the first version when I reviewed it a while back. Happily, it appears the new version tackled the shortcomings of the first version head on. And it's being offered as a free update to everyone who bought the first version. I'll be having a look at the new version and sharing my thoughts some time in the coming weeks.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Free Patches from Patchpool
Patchpool is a new website featuring free samples and patches for Kontakt, Synplant, Alchemy, More Feedback Machine 2, Reaktor 5, iZotope plug-ins, Absynth. The site accepts donations, so if you find the patches useful, be sure to show them some love!
Friday, June 11, 2010
Free Sample Friday: Seattle Rain
Today's selection is something a bit different for Free Sample Friday. This is the first proper "field recording" I've made on my recently acquired Zoom H2. While it's true that rain is hardly a rare occurrence here in Seattle, getting it this time of year is pretty strange. (We just tell people it rains here year round to keep the tourists away...)
As this recording is over 5 minutes long, I've provided this in MP3 format instead of WAV in the interest of not killing my bandwidth, but it's at 320k, so it still sounds quite nice. Note that this is normalized, but sounds much nicer and more natural at low levels, as the real sound itself does. In addition to the sound of the rain falling, you can hear the constant drip of my gutter as well as a few nice stereo drivebys of cars passing on the street. I didn't add any fancy fades or anything, figuring the original file as is would be more useful. Try taking shorter loops of the rain fall portions and putting them behind your favorite pad sound, or using the car drivebys as transitions in your next track, or better yet, bring a portion of the sound into a program like Absynth or Alchemy and use it as the start to entirely new alien sounds. Hell, just loop it and throw it on a CD as something to help you fall asleep at night. Enjoy! Compress archive weighs in at just under 12MB.
GO GET IT!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
