Cool analog synth drum sample collection

[msl]

Hey guys, a friend of mine Matt Urmenyi just released a rather massive collection of analog drum sounds called Synth Drums. He's a big hardware guy with a very nice collection of synths. Its a labour of love kinda thing with almost 6000 hits sampled from 10 classic synths. System 100, Jupiter 8, Pro1, Prophet5, MS20, Model D, etc, with lots of outboard, tape and vinyl treatments.

Anyway there's no loops or construction kit shite, just one shots. I think its very suited to techno, has a very industrial metalic sound. He asked me and a few other people to make demos for him, you can hear them below, mine uses his sounds for everything except the bass, strings and chords. The second demo is 100% his samples.

There's a 200 sample demo available at the Wave Alchemy website if you want to check it out.
http://www.wavealchemy.co.uk






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[Críoch]

Jeeezus Michael.. Savage track man!!

Must check out those samples. Really cool.

[msl]

ah nice one man, thanks!

[Johnlad]

Looks interesting. Will download the demo sample pack when I get back and check it out. Nice blog post on there as well describing the processes of making the pack

[Planar]

Pretty impressed with the demo sounds from this, apart from maybe the kicks. I thought I had enough drum one-shots with Geist, but I'm seriously considering this... Maybe when they have a sale...

[LuigiTozzii]

Took em,seem absolutely usefull to me!

[Mattias]

Nice stuff.
These guys knows their shit for sure.

[golden beers]

Thought I'd come in to say hi. been lurking in this forum for a little while. seems like a great community here.

I'm the guy responsible for most of the synthesis in this library. I approached msl after hearing some of his work over at GS, I think it's a wicked track. Nice deep original. I also want to thank msl for his feedback, some new sounds were put in the pack right before release because of his observations.

and a big thank you to all in this thread for the kind words. it's appreciated. The library is doing well. We've already got a sequel on the cards, but it's going to be a little different. not simply the same again. Hope to release that before Christmas so stay tuned.

about kicks

IMO the library is very strong on kicks (yea i know, i WOULD say that wouldn't i?), there's 444 kicks in the processed section, 298 in the unprocessed section and 313 in the vinyl/tape section.
There's some sounds that you can't find anywhere else, unless you happen to have the same synthesiser and make the kick in the same way on it! - Everybody knows the basic method for producing a kick on a synth. self resonating filter, env follow. boom there's your kick.

But you dont have to do it that way, there's lots of scope with FM, pink noise, inverted EGs etc. and what do you do if your synth does not have a self resonating filter? like the jupiter 8. you have to go about things differently and you get a different result. I love the jupiter kicks BTW, 8 voices in unison = richness.

Also there's simple tricks you can do on some syths that let you extend the ordinary scales of cut-off and env follow, so you get that self resonating kick sound but with more movement. I tried to make interesting and unusual sounding kicks as well as the 'classic' sounds and as a consequence we had to create a new sub-folder called 'unusual kicks' to put them in as they didn't fit into the other categories. Some absolute face-melters can be found in all the kick sections, much more in this pack than the usual 909 clones..

[Planar]

The quality of this is sky-high, so I have no doubts the kicks in the full thing are great. The ones in the demo pack probably aren't the best ones (I didn't think they were bad btw), the ones in the demo tracks sound great. And why give away the best stuff in a free pack eh?

You should do some tutorials on drum synthesis...

[golden beers]

i'm probably going to make a series of short videos in time. one sound per vid, 2 mins a pop. something quick you can watch on a coffee break. done on the jupiter.

re demo kicks not being the best. this is down to taste i think. we did try and put good examples in the free taster pack. obviously there's more variety in the full thing, and opinion of this or that kick is often down to context in music. our processed versions are still quite malleable, meaning we tried not to 'over process', you can push them harder in the mix if you want and they will take to that well.

[Mattias]

Mr Golden Beers,

I'm very happy that people like you are around in the sample business.
Keep up the great work, I'm a happy customer.

[Planar]

re demo kicks not being the best. this is down to taste i think. we did try and put good examples in the free taster pack. obviously there's more variety in the full thing, and opinion of this or that kick is often down to context in music. our processed versions are still quite malleable, meaning we tried not to 'over process', you can push them harder in the mix if you want and they will take to that well.

That's fair enough mate- I was only auditioning them quickly and reported back my initial impressions, I spent more time with the other percussion hits tbh. I'll stick a few kicks into some loops and see how I find them in context with other elements.

i'm probably going to make a series of short videos in time. one sound per vid, 2 mins a pop. something quick you can watch on a coffee break. done on the jupiter.

That kind of video series would be brilliant. I'd especially like to see some more of the unusual techniques.

[Críoch]

Ahh brilliant! Thanks for getting in touch Matt. It's such a small community generally online. Lovely to get such an insight into how you approached this project.

Wish you lots of success with it. I like Wave Alchemy a lot & not surprised that you have worked together. Great concept / result

[Hades]

re demo kicks not being the best. this is down to taste i think. we did try and put good examples in the free taster pack. obviously there's more variety in the full thing, and opinion of this or that kick is often down to context in music. our processed versions are still quite malleable, meaning we tried not to 'over process', you can push them harder in the mix if you want and they will take to that well.

That's fair enough mate- I was only auditioning them quickly and reported back my initial impressions, I spent more time with the other percussion hits tbh. I'll stick a few kicks into some loops and see how I find them in context with other elements.
.

I agree with that, to be honest. I wasn't too much impressed with the kicks either, at least compared to the rest of the free pack.
But you've convinced me with your posts to actually buy the whole pack now.

Congratulations !
First sample pack I ever bought in my whole life.
Am I selling out now ?

[golden beers]

First sample pack I ever bought in my whole life.
Am I selling out now ?

no.. i am!

[LuigiTozzii]

It's huge,i repeat that after trying that out on a new track =)

T H A N K Y O U

[Hades]

First sample pack I ever bought in my whole life.
Am I selling out now ?

no.. i am!

well, here's the thing.
If I compare making music with cooking, buying a sample pack to me feels a bit like I'm only opening up different packages of already made ingredients, and all I gotta do is mix the right ingredients and hey presto, a decent meal is ready to be served.
It doesn't feel like much of a challenge, in a way.
But I kind of like making pesto's myself instead of buying a jar of ready-made pesto, you know ?
(Unless I lack the time and things gotta go fast of course)

But on the other hand, there's certain things I've done in my kitchen that I'm glad I did once or twice, but that I'm certain I won't do again.
One of them being stripping fresh eels of their skin. Not a very fun thing to do, trust me.
Especially when you call up your friend about 2 hours later (the one who caught you the eels, good amateur chef) and he tells you there's no need to skin eels at all, you can perfectly prepare them with the skin attached.

I love making my own sounds from scratch with synths, I think it's something any self-respecting techno musician should be able to do.
But yet I seldomly make drum sounds (unless it's with a drum synth like my jomox), simpy cause I consider it's easier to use samples. The results are almost always better and I have little or no fun making drum sounds whereas I have tons of fun making all other sounds.
So for drums I always used Simpler, Sampler, Battery or Kontakt.
Never bought extra sample packs for them though.
Untill now.
Will try them out first thing tomorrow.

So.... thx for skinning the eel for me mr golden beers !

ps didn't know the jupiter 8 doesn't have a self-resonating filter, how strange...

pps why do I feel like a beer all of a sudden ?

[golden beers]

i'll come back tomorrow to talk about how this library is designed to be more than just 'painting by numbers' as it were. i would go along with the skinning eel analogy, but not the ready meal one. loop packs are more like that in my mind. and sometimes frozen pizza can be yummy. if you're drunk.

wanted to mention again the jupiter8 regarding the non self-resonating filter..

some synths, eg Andromeda, have very wide parameters that mean it's easy to go out side of the sweet musical area and make the thing sound ugly. (not a bad thing). the jupiter8 on the other hand, has an untra-wide sweet spot. so much so that it's almost impossible to dial in an ugly sound.. it's doable, but difficult. and even then the 'ugly sound' is usually an amazing ugly sound! i've read that the non-self resonating filter is part of that design philosophy: maximise the sweet spot / make it impossible to dial in a 'bad' sound

for your interest, here's an example of the jupiter8's capabilities and tone. quite a low RMS on this, you may need to turn up your volume a tad.

[Hades]

agreed that the ready meal analogy is more for when you're using loops.
That's a big no no for me, though.
They can cut my balls off without sedation if they ever catch me doing that.

I understand what you mean with the sweet spot.
I have an Andromeda here, and a Juno 60 sitting right underneath.
I absolutely love my Andromeda, but it's true you can just as well end up with a sound you could never use. But then again, there are so many parameters it's easy enough to get back into the sweet spot again if you have some patience, plus it kind of makes sense it can't always sound so sweet with all those parameters available.
It also helps if you keep the volume of the oscillators down. I've read in the tips & tricks manual that's floating around the web somewhere that the andy starts distorting slightly as soon as you pass the 50% level with the oscillators volume. And that 50% is for all oscillators together. So if you're dialing in Osc 1 at 20% and Osc 2 at 25%, you have only about 5% left if you want to add a Sub Osc.
I've tested this a few times, and it does indeed help.
It's not as black and white as they say though, so the rule has to be taken with a big grain of salt at all times.
There's many other little things about the Andromeda as well. Like the square wave is only a pure square at 52% instead of 50% if I'm not mistaken.
I kind of like these flaws though, that's part of working with hardware, right ?
Softsynths almost never have that much character.

So yes, if I compare my Andy to my Juno 60, the Juno 60 has a much bigger sweet spot.
But I can do so much more with the Andy though.
I'm glad I have both.

Last week a visitor saw my studio and said "why all these synths, isn't one enough ?"
ah, where to start if you want to explain that to non-musicians...

[golden beers]

Last week a visitor saw my studio and said "why all these synths, isn't one enough ?"
ah, where to start if you want to explain that to non-musicians...

yea i get the same thing. usually: but can't you do all this on a PC?