Results for Hollow Sun

Hollow Sun has released Novachord, a sample library for Kontakt featuring the sounds of the Hammond Novachord.

With 120 exciting programs and many hundreds of hand crafted, long and luxurious 24-bit multi-samples, this unique collection presents this incredible, innovative – and almost unknown – relic from 1939 as accurately as possible. The Novachord was the world’s first polyphonic synth powered by 163 valves, thousands of capacitors and miles of hand soldered wiring in hand sewn looms encased in a most beautiful wooden cabinet. Such a beast would be an achievement today – that this was a product of 1939 is all the more remarkable.

We have carefully programmed the soundset to be as accurate a representation of ‘the real thing’ as possible such that playing it is as close to having a Novachord in front of you. However, in some programs, we have also taken liberties with modern synth post-processing that Laurens Hammond and his design team could only dream about. I am sure they would be as excited as we are about this soundset if they were around today.

But however much we have mangled the original sound, the character of of the Novachord comes shining through and you can almost smell the bakelite and the musty odour of glowing thermionic valves warming the 70 year old wooden cabinet.

Novachord is currently available in Kontakt 3.5 format, priced at $160 USD (EXS24, Structure, Akai S5/6000, and Alesis Fusion versions coming).

More information: Hollow Sun / Novachord

Hollow Sun has released the Bass Station Freepack, a free sample pack featuring the sounds of the Novation Bass Station.

Hollow Sun Bass Station Freepack (Kontakt)

From the Hollow Sun website:

What’s on offer here are 30 excellent synth bass sounds that cover a wide range of genres, uses and applications and which Dan has looped and programmed to perfection. Nothing fancy – just 30 solid synth bass sounds that sit nicely in a track.

But they cover the full keyboard range from C1-C7 and are therefore equally as useful as fruity analogue polysynth sounds and lead lines and the raw samples are open to much abuse by the more adventurous amongst you.

And in keeping with the Hollow Sun ethos, all the sounds have been carefully optimised by Dan to have minimum impact on RAM and disk storage and CPU strain making them fast and efficient.

For Kontakt users, there’s a bonus in that there are 90 programs and the programs have themed skins and some custom controls for quick tweaking.

The Bass Station Freepack is available as a free download in Alesis Fusion, Akai S5/6000, Z4/8, MPC4000, MPC5000V2 and Kontakt 3 formats.

More information: Hollow Sun / Freepacks

Hollow Sun has released Taurus Pedals, a sample library featuring the woofer troubling sound of the legendary Taurus bass pedals.

The Moog Taurus bass pedal synth was a totally unique product (then and now) in that it was a simple bass synth that could be played with the feet.

The samples here come from Taurus Mk I owner and vintage synth aficiando Paul Ward who has carefully sampled his pristine instrument over its entire three octave range with long and sumptuous samples lasting as long as 20 seconds before Hollow Sun’s legendary seamless loops kick in. Some program variations are included but there is nothing to stop these samples forming the basis of many synth bass sounds with some creativity.

This is a woofer wobbling delight for all afficiandos of the lower end and arguably the finest representation of this classic sound.

Taurus Pedals is available for Kontakt, Akai S5/6000 (and Akai Z4/8, MPC4000 and MPC5000V2) and Alesis Fusion, priced at $20 USD.

Hollow Sun has also released the Speak & Spell FreePack, a sample library featuring sounds by Luke Smiles from motion laboratories who has put together a meticulous collection of all the letters, numbers, words and phrases from his own Speak & Spell.

More information: Hollow Sun / Taurus Pedals / Speak & Spell FreePack

Hollow Sun has released Vox Humana, a free pack of samples from the Moog PolyMoog.

In something of a PolyMoog fest, Joeri Peeters (who provided the PolyMoog Keyboard Strings I&II samples below) now offers his exquisite PolyMoog Keyboard ‘Vox Humana ‘ samples, arguably THE most distinctive and famous sound from this instrument which shot to fame when it was used as the signature sound in Gary Numan’s hit record ‘Cars’, so good they released it three times and STILL gets regular airplay today and STILL sounds as good as it did back in 1979 when it was first released.

Like the Strings I&II below, these come from a lovingly restored PolyMog Keyboard 280e owned by Leo Gelderland from Holland and we are grateful to him for allowing Joeri access to it to sample it in such detail. They are long samples with room to breathe and have been impeccably and seamlessly looped.

The PolyMoog Vox Humana FreePack is available in Akai S5/6000, Kontakt 3 and Alesis Fusion formats from Hollow Sun, and in additional formats from Joeri Peeters.

More information: Hollow Sun / Joeri Peeters

Hollow Sun has announced the release of the PolyMoog Strings FreePack, a set of samples of the Strings 1 and 2 presets taken from a genuine PolyMoog Keyboard by Joeri Peeters.

Joeri has managed to get access to a re-conditioned PolyMoog Keyboard owned by Leo Gelderland from Holland and is pictured left with Leo’s instrument.

This FreePack is very detailed with long samples every minor third across the keyboard range. Each one is impeccably looped and is as good a representation of this classic keyboard as you are likely to find anywhere.

The PolyMoog Keyboard was a preset-only version of the bigger PolyMoog. The PolyMoog was not a huge success in the market, partly because of its hefty price tage (around £5,000) but the fact that it wasn’t actually truly polyphonic with just one filter to service all voices much like the ARP Omni and Omni II. It was also extremely unreliable and many of them spent more time in service centres than they did in studios!

The PolyMoog Keyboard was a scaled down version of its bigger sibling featuring a mere 14 presets (6 more than the original PolyMoog!) and limited editability. The most notable presets were the fabled Vox Humana sound and the two string sounds on offer here. It was more reasonably priced at £2,000. Of course, the PolyMoog Keyboard shot to fame in the hands of Gary Numan who used one extensively in his music.

The PolyMoog Strings FreePack is available as a free download in Kontakt 3, Akai S5/6000 and Fusion formats.

More information: Hollow Sun

Roland Clan is celebrating its 6^th anniversary with another $5 sound library.

To celebrate our sixth anniversary, for a limited time we offer a special Sound Gift sound library co-developed by Sinevibes, which costs just $5. It comes with over 100 MB of original sounds made with Roland’s latest and most powerful synthesizers like Fantom-X, Fantom-G, V-Synth and V-Synth GT, including 10 multisampled instruments, 10 drum loops, 10 bassline loops and 10 ambient loops all in AIFF and WAV formats.

Each purchase will contribute to a fundraising campaign to raise $1,000 by the end of March, to keep the site online and free of advertisements.

A purchase of the Sound Gift will also give you a chance to win $600 of goodies:

• $200 gift card for any of the products from Sinevibes
• Select sound library CD from Hollow Sun sound design studio ($55)
• Mixing or remix service from Dining Room Studio ($160)
• Fantom YASE sample conversion and management software from Nexoe ($160)

Visit the Roland Clan website for more information.