Monday, October 28, 2013

Arctic Rooster - organic synthesizer for Kontakt

Today I serve Arctic Rooster. It's a sort of neo-retro organic synthesizer for Kontakt. It is based on very short waveforms, serving as 'oscillators', that has been cut from recording of an authentic Icelandic rooster that I took this summer. Also there is the oscillator bank made of waveforms that I took from recording of my own voice.

Features in an egg shell:
- 15 waveforms in 3 oscillator banks,
- wood finishing enclosure,
- 3 memory banks,
- lcd display,
- 3 LFOs and lots of knobs.


And this is how it sounds, first the rooster recording, then synthesizer sounds, one instance at a time, no external effects:



Finally the download link - 710KB. Requires full version of Kontakt 4.2.4 or newer. Free to download and use in your music. If you find is useful or amusing, I encourage you to show your support, pick one of my albums that you can find hovering somewhere on the right side of these pages. Have fun.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Breaking bread (crunchy percussion)

I was in fairly strange mood that day. I have found quite impressive collection of super dry bread pieces, buns, bread sticks and matzoh, dwelling upon my refrigerator. This stuff was crispy and crunchy and somehow I've seen a drum kit possibility in it. I took them to studio room and started to crush, smash, destroy, break up and take them apart with my bare hands in front of the microphone. Then I cut out some tasty slices out of the recording. I know it was a weird idea, but in the end, it sounds better than one might have expected. Here, listen, it's a short demo made with bread sounds only, with a pint of reverb:



You know, it may be a perfect candidate for your bread and butter drum kit. Get it here: download package - 3MB, 90 samples, wav format, mono 44.1 kHz / 24 bit, and for free. Also there's an example kit, using some of the sounds, in Battery 2 and sfz formats. The samples are split into two folders. '44 raw' contains 74 slices cut out of the original 88.2 kHz recording, re-sampled to 44.1 kHz. In '44 processed' folder, you will find heavily processed samples, basically the samples have been slowed down a great deal, cut and then up-sampled to 44.1 kHz. This way I transformed, crunchy bun breaks, into something more or less suitable to mimic bass drum or snare.

Trivia:
1. Matzoh wasn't kosher.
2. The side product of this production has been given to a friendly family of field mice, who live in my garden.