AfroDJMac has released Broken Bells Rack, the 10th instrument in a series of free Ableton Live packs.
This week’s download is created from samples of two different xylophones. One, I bought at a music store for about a hundred bucks and another belongs to my friend DF, who plays in an excellent noise rock band from Brooklyn called Imaginary Weapons (check them out, it’s very melodic, noisy, contemplative guitar rock woven together with some beautiful synth parts).
The synth you are getting this week is actually four instruments in one. The first two are the xylophones layered together. These can be mixed together to your preference. Next, while thinking about the nostalgia I get from the xylophone, and how our memories are often distortions of what really happened, I decided to reverse the samples and layer those over the original sounds. So, when you hit the notes, a traditional xylophone sounds, but then a reversed xylophone creeps back in with an echo of those same notes. You can play the instrument with just the normal xylophones, just the reversed ones, or a blend of both. The reversed xylophones are being moved around the stereo spectrum via LFOs, which adds the the cerebral effect I am going for with this instrument.
The Broken Bells Rack for Ableton* is available as a free download from AfroDJMac.
More information: AfroDJMac
*This pack comes with the original samples so you can import them into a sampler/instrument/DAW of your choice as well.
