Prime Loops has released Progressive Dubstep, a collection of 500MB+ of dark, detailed and ambient basslines, synth leads and pads, drum patterns, SFX loops and drum one-shots.
Dare yourself to descend into unchartered sonic depths with “Progressive Dubstep”, the brand new sample pack from audio pioneer Dmitri Vasilyev. Float through the sounds of ghostly subterranean caverns, scorched post-industrial landscapes and dense and detached nether worlds – this pack will take you on an intoxicating journey to new realms of deep and intelligent bass music.
Inside you’ll find sounds in the form of basslines, synth leads and pads, drum patterns, SFX loops and drum one-shots. All are coated in an alluring Post-Dubstep aura, taking elements from the dark, detailed and ambient work of James Blake, Burial, Jamie XX and SBTRKT. Make no mistake, this pack is not your typical slice of aggressive Dubstep mania!
I never really quite know what to expect when something is labeled ambient. Closest to my personal musical preference, I think of the sounds of Aphex Twin, Biosphere, System 7, The Orb, Boards of Canada. That kind of thing.
For creating Ambient Illusions, Dmitry Vasilyev took inspiration from Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre, as well as the easy listening sound of chill-out collections such as Café Del Mar and Buddah Bar.
Kick back and relax! Prime Loops are extremely proud to announce this ultimate collection of mind-bending ambient & chill-out instrumental loops – prepare yourself for “Ambient Illusions”!
Inside this extraordinary sample pack you will find an addictive blend of over 120 unreal ambient textures, hypnotic arpeggio patterns, mesmerizing chord progressions, intricately crafted sound effects and beautifully sculptured wall-of-sound atmospheres, ranging between 65 and 140 BPM.
The loops have indicative titles, with type classification (synth, seq, music, etc.), tempo and key information included. The samples are quite lengthy (up to 49 seconds!) with an average of ~20 seconds, allowing for progressions and plenty of movement of sounds.
Dmitry steers clear of useless repetition so you won’t find the exact same 4 bar melody being repeated 8 times. Instead you get well thought out evolving sounds that still loop well.
The overall vibe of the sounds is quite positive/light, relaxing, sometimes deep and spacey, never very dark or disturbing.
Have a listen to the official demo track below, which is a good representation of the sounds included in Ambient Illusions.
I hold Dmitry Vasilyev in high regard. Ever since I came across his work as Cyberworm – offering free samples on his Rhythm-Lab blog, I have been impressed with pretty much everything he does.
Ambient Illusions is no exception. This library is a stunning collection of ambient textures / atmospheres / sounds. Well produced, wonderfully creative, unique and inspiring, there isn’t a single dud to be found really.
This sample pack is perfect for adding an ambient, chill-out vibe to your work.
Peter Kirn talks to the people responsible for one of the most exciting things over at the Winter NAMM show, the Tempest drum machine – Roger Linn and Dave Smith.
In songwriting, there was Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan. In music gear design, it’s hard not to assign a similar degree of expectation to the pairing of Dave Smith and Roger Linn.
Between them, these two designers have been a major part of what music technology is today. Dave Smith pioneered MIDI (even giving it its acronym), the first microprocessor-based instrument (the Prophet-5), the first programmable polyphonic synth, and other innovations at Sequential Circuits. Add to that landmarks in physical modeling research (at Yamaha) and the first PC soft synth. Roger Linn built the first programmable sampled-sound drum machine and with the LM-1, LinnDrum, Linn 9000, and his work on the MPC60 and MPC3000, introduced workflows and ideas in drum machines we now take for granted. It’s not easy to overstate the contributions of either designer.
For the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl Accident, Ambientaria Records has gathered many Dark Ambient artists, including famous ones like Northaunt or Atomtrakt, for a Compilation project.
The album will be released on April 1st, 2011. It will be sold at a low price.
All the benefits shall be reversed to a Chernobyl Children International, is a non-profit organisation with United Nations NGO status, in order to help people suffering from Radiation Poisoning.
This is Compilation Video V2.2 (updated January 2011) of sound sculptures and installations by Swiss artist Zimoun. I can watch this for hours.
Zimoun's sound sculptures and installations are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the «artificial» and the «organic».
He is interested in the artistic research of simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviours in sound and motion. He creates sound pieces from basic components, often using multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns.
Miguel Isaza introduces Designing Sound TV, Television for Sound Designers.
Could you imagine the concept of television re-imagined for sound designers only? How would that be?
How would be a Field Recording TV channel? or can you imagine a show where you can see how the sound of a recent film was done? or what about watching some channels where you can find other guys like you recording sounds outside the world? What if you could watch interviews with different sound designers each night while you drink a cup coffee?
Well, I’ve created something like that, but using the Internet. It’s called Designing Sound TV, a new website packed with lots videos about sound for films, video games, tv, and more. There you can find all kind of stuff on sound design, field reording, foley, mixing, and more.
# Hiphop Experience vol.4 Dmitry Vasilyev aka Cyberworm brings the fourth part in series of free hiphop drum loops (36 loops in stereo wav format, 24bit/44.1kHz, 43 MB).
Music Thing is back! (though Tom notes that “Normal service will not, I’m afraid, be resumed…”)
After almost two years since the last blog post Tom Whitwell returns with a list of 23 DIY guitar effect pedal kits.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a few evenings building DIY guitar effects. It's fun to build things that you can use. If you want to get started, one of the hardest things is buying components. Try to buy a 10Ω resistor from Farnell, and you’re faced with a choice of 345 items. So, starting out buying a kit is a good idea. At least you’ll know the parts are right, even if when your soldering isn’t.
However, not many people sell kits. Despite the potential markup on a handful of bulk components, the customer service is – presumably – a nightmare. Here are 23 companies who will sell you complete component kits for guitar effects – many more people produce PCBs, or sell finished pedals. Stay tuned for similar lists on synths/noise boxes and tube amplifiers.
# Google Translate Beatboxing – If you haven’t heard about Google Translate’s beatboxing skills yet you probably spend a more than healthy amount of time away from the interwebs. Check it out, it’s cool.
Jon Tidey at Audio Geek Zine shares some useful tips on editing & workflow as part of a series of 9 interviews with recording engineers from around the world.
What is Home Recording Tactics? This is a collection of audio interviews with 9 hard working, successful home studio engineers (including me). The interviews were led by Joe Gilder of Home Studio Corner. He got these guys to share all their secrets on a variety of home recording topics.
Who says technology has to move fast and die young? Leon Theremin may have been a full century ahead of his time, before computers, before transistors, before jet engines or atomic power or rockets.
ReacTable creator Martin Kaltenbrunner has a virtual Theremin prototype built with Microsoft’s depth-sensing, 3D Kinect camera. And what he really needs is some players of the real Theremin to help develop it.
SoundCloud’s iPhone app makes it easy to record and share your sounds from anywhere.
Today, we’re excited about the release of the recording feature.
The Record button will make it easy for you to capture all kinds of sounds right on SoundCloud & with the iPhone app and share them from anywhere to everywhere on the web: your website, social network profiles or simply between friends & family.
Friends of hand-held devices not sporting the omnipresent “i” prefix take note: TouchOSC for Android has been published on the Android Market! And it’s free. Free as in beer.
Prime Loops has recently released Ambient Fractals, a sample library featuring ambient sound effects by resident producer Dmitry Vasilyev aka Cyberworm.
Engineered to capture the true essence of ambience, “Ambient Fractals” will twist you through the mathematics of sound, bringing you a mesmerizing selection of waveform manipulations and spaced out oscillations from the sublime side of synthesis. It’s never been easier to find that extra layer of texture for your tunes and soundtracks, adding depth, tension and mystery to any mixdown.
The library includes nearly 300 samples and loops which Dmitry created with a number of hardware synthesizers, including the Waldorf Q, Access Virus, Roland JP8000, Korg Prophecy and Clavia Nord.
The focus of this library is on single shot sound fx samples. A total of 276 sounds are categorized in 15 folders, including things like Atmos, Glides, LFOs, Reverses, and Weirdos. Other than being serially numbered the actual samples within the folders do not have any additional descriptions. I prefer a more distinctive naming convention but since there is a reasonably small amount of samples in each folder it isn’t too big a deal. Unfortunately there is no info on which key samples are in.
While a number of one shot samples are short sounds (e.g. stabs, perc, blips) most are actually quite long, from several seconds up to nearly half a minute.
Have a listen to the product demo below to get an idea of the type of sounds included in Ambient Fractals.
Note: the audio demo includes some additional sounds not included in this library (e.g. the drum beat).
Let’s take a look at the one shot samples in detail.
Atmos (24 samples), averaging 10 seconds per samples these sounds set some great ambiance. Mostly darker sounds, brooding and with anticipation of something bad waiting to happen. Puts me in a space thriller type mood.
Blasters (16 samples), more space sounds in this folder featuring sounds of space aliens blasting their weapons at full force. Mainly shorter zaps and blasts.
Chords (24 samples), lots of suspenseful chord hits, sounds ranging from organ and piano to filtered house chords.
Delayed (26 samples), various melodic and percussive sounds treated with full force delay effects.
Glides (9 samples), kind of like drive by whooshing sounds, but then… you guessed it, from all kinds of space craft type vehicles.
Hits (20 samples), short sounds -mostly percussive- heavily drenched in massive reverb and other processing.
LFOs (18 samples), LFO modulated sounds, including some typical rippling sound fx and dub siren/alarm type sounds.
Noise (13 samples), includes some wind type sounds.
Other (37 samples), various 8bit sounds, blips, filtered sounds, vocal fx, sweeps, and more.
Pitched (12 samples), going up… going down! These samples create movement by shifting pitch in various ways.
Reversed (10 samples), some of these reversed sounds are particularly tense/creepy and intimidating.
Sirens (10 samples), various real-ish and not so real sounding sirens.
Stabs (27 samples), includes orchestral, choir, organ, piano, synth, distorted guitar… lots of mostly very shorts hits.
Synths (19 samples), nice variety of processed synth sounds (no “simple” sounds).
Weirdos (12 samples), some noisy, glitchy, bubbly sounds. Not sure why they are called weirdos as they sound similar to many of the other samples in this pack.
Besides the one shot sounds you also get a collection of 20 loops, ranging from 90 to 130 bpm. These are in the same vein as the single sounds. These noisy, glitchy, heavily processed tonal and atonal sounds do have some more descriptive names indicating bpm, and key info where relevant.
So what do I think?
Product: Prime Loops Ambient Fractals Format: 24bit/44kHz samples (various formats) Price: £16.95 GBP Like: great sound design, lots of unique material Don’t like: no key info for one shots Verdict: 8/10
First off, the title might suggest otherwise but I don’t think Ambient Fractals is geared towards ambient music per se. It’s more of a sound fx collection, including tons of well produced sounds that are great for cinematic work, experimental music and to spice up any type of electronic music really.
The whole production has a bit of a dark undertone, which makes it great for science fiction or thriller type music/soundtracks. If I had to come up with a title for this sample pack I would make sure it would have “space” or “alien” in it.
While having a good variety of sounds, many samples in Ambient Fractals are heavily processed with reverb, delay and other effects. Now much of the processing is what makes the samples unique so I am not saying this is a bad thing, but it obviously comes at the cost of usability. That said, the samples do sound simply great.
In short, Ambient Fractals includes a wealth of high quality sound fx for adding some zing to your productions.
Prime Loops is offering a free demo pack featuring 20 samples and loops so check it out and see what you think.
What if blowing tunes on beer bottles was raised to the level of musical science?
Through even the mundane medium of packaging, design can transform the everyday. DJ and designer Matt Braun of Philadelphia, collaborating with Chris Mufalli, use labels to tune the level of beer remaining in the bottle for musical results. Pitches are printed on the labels, allowing you to exactly match the liquid inside to a pitch you want, and join along with your fellow imbibers for a performance.
It’s not just a label that’s different. Ridges on the sides of the bottles make them double as Guiro-style percussion. The neck was adjusted for ergonomics. Even the wooden box becomes a tongue drum.
I love Ableton Live’s workflow and while I’m a big fan of Ableton Sampler, Operator, Impulse, Drum Racks etc… I do heavily utilize VST’s to extend Live’s range even further. I try to find plugins that not only sound great, but also integrate into and compliment Live’s workflow. One recent addition to my software rig is Sonic Charge’s fantastic pattern based drum-machine synth uTonic.
In this post, I’ll show you how to use MIDI to change patterns on the fly within uTonic. This will allow you to use uTonic as a drum machine in conjunction with your other Live clips and scenes.
At the Kansas City Mini Maker Faire, Taylor Jessee introduced me to his one of his latest creations, the Mini Drumset. Dissatisfied with plastic miniatures that look authentic but lack the full sound of real drums, he decided to design his own. He spent lots of time perfecting the snare sound with multiple layers of wrap, wire, and sugar, and finding the appropriate materials to produce a good symbol crash- in this case, a sawed-off candlestick holder. But he didn't stop there, and produced the above infomercial to advertise the kit. He is actually selling them, too!
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