Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Junk percussion.

Junk percussion sample set is side product of Psychodrumma II development. At one point I needed more percussion sounds, I quickly collected some junk around the house and I took a long evening session of banging on stuff. Some of these sounds were incorporated into Psychodrumma soundbanks, but still there were plenty of leftovers. I finally had time to edit them, so today I'm offering household junk percussion set. With a little of reverb on, it sound like this:



List of object used for this sample set: broken 8 mm camera, empty beer cans, bicycle horn, bowed metal plate, broken heater, carton boxes, the remains of an old clothes airer, dirty lid, duct tape, dusty box, hollow plate, iron plate, metal tube, moldy books, motor oil can, oily plate, self propelled plastic toy mouse, plastic bowl, plastic rainpipe, fat chunk of rubber band, rusty lid, rusty saw, shiny lid, shiny pot, some other pot, yet another pot, stapler and woodblocks.

There are 200 wav files, 44 kHz, 16 bit, trimmed and maximized, royalty free to use in your music. Recording equipment: AT3035 microphone, Focusrite ISA One preamp, Echo Audio Audiofire card.

Download here. 13MB zip file, fresh, free and fragrant. Have fun.

For more junk percussion see here.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Psychodrumma mk.II, chaos management workstation

Psychodrumma mark II is reworked and expanded version of Psychodrumma, fantasy, neo-retro drum machine/music generator for Kontakt 4 sampler. It can act as a drum machine and generate random rhythmic, ambient or melody patterns. It is based on matrix of nine synchronized step sequencers, and a meta-sequecer. Most of settings can be programmed automatically by randomizers, creating strange machine music. It has plenty of knobs and a lot of flashing lights. The device comes with three banks of 100 one shot samples each, these eclectic sets were made from synthesized sounds (digital and analog), field recordings, animal sounds, unusual percussion, bass and guitar tones and noises, voice fragments, objects (metal plates, pots, radiators, machine parts, bicycle horn, plastic tubes, firecrackers), radio noise, vinyl crackles, car engine and icy snow squeaking under heavy boots.

You can get mark I version for free two posts below.
Some of new features of mark II version:
  • algorithmic mode, makes it possible to playback or loop sequences of random events,
  • music box, tunes melodic samples to defined pattern, to create melody sequences,
  • reworked and expanded sound banks, including third tonal bank to use for generating melodies,
  • saving and loading presets, presets can then be sequenced in meta-sequencer, to create tracks inside the machine, preset-set can be then saved to file,
  • automated effects rack.
And are example tracks, sequenced entirely in machine's meta-sequencer:

Rhythm patterns were partly programmed by hand and party shuffled by the machine. Melody lines were applied entirely by machine's looped randomizers.

You can find detailed description in the manual.
To see how it works look at videos in previous post.

Psychodrumma mark II is available at Loot Audio.

Note, you need full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 4 or newer to make it work. It won't work properly in Kontakt Player. Also, as it's written in KSP script, it is quite impossible to import it to any other sampler.

Psychodrumma mk.II, videos

Here's set of videos for Psychodrumma mark II.

Browsing pre-programmed sequence tapes:



Programming a sequence, a possible way to play with the machine, first I create some steady rhythm manually, then I add random patterns:


Playing piano. In this example Psychodrumma midi out is being re-routed from midi channel 1 to channel 2 and then send back to the same instance of Kontakt, where it is propelling a piano.


Metasequencer functionality and application.



Just for fun. Controlling Alchemy by Psychodrumma randomizers. First send melody, then cast drifting controllers.