STRICTLY INDUSTRIAL T-Shirts

I finally managed to have a small batch of STRICTLY INDUSTRIAL T-Shirt printed. Slim Fit cut available in Black or Khaki Green. Stock is very short and limited for now.

AVAILABLE FROM BANDCAMP

Sizes in Cm:

• S: Chest 86 - Waist 81
• L: Chest 96 - Waist 91
• XL: Chest 102 - Waist  92

Check your body type against provided measures because T-shirts
fit quite slim.
Anyone interested can either drop an E-Mail or hit me on Facebook.

Download of this compilation comes free with the T-Shirt:

Harsh Digital Nose VST

As too many time happens, this VST simply laid on my plug-ins folder for a too long time, without me having time to dig into it since today.
I must say that after just ten minutes of semi-random tweaking I regretted not having used it before and after twenty I came out with a solid groove, possibly for a new track.

The concept behind resembles the one of a program that I used to run on the Amiga called RGS so a small paint program used to shape waveforms and the ability to import images. Those data are then added or multiplied together according to the knobs on the right to produce sounds.

Harsh Digital Nose a synthesizer that converts two images into two oscillator waveforms and then mixes them in various horrible ways. You can drag and drop images or draw them on the plugin in real time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxHBZXtrgjg

WELL ITS A LITTLE BIT OF EXPERIMENTAL FUN AND YOU CAN PAINT AND DRAW AND COMMUNICATE WITH THE ALIENS TOO.

The name couldn't have been better as it develops some very convincing industrial leads. Deep, polyhedric sounds with sharp highs are guaranteed.

MORE INFO AND DOWNLOAD

.WAVs from various oldschool sound chips

It's a fact: there are no boundaries on the amount of samples one needs to own in order to compose electronic music. We're always hungry for samples. Lucky for us the Internet have no boundaries at all and today, during a hyperspace travel on the outer rim of the galaxy, I stumbled upon this great blog from SEBASTIAN TOMCZAK, full of samples of old soundchips.

I have created a set of samples that have been recorded directly from an Atari POKEY chip. I have created all of the sounds myself on the hardware (as in, these are not sounds or samples recorded from games or demo programs). The output from the sound chip has been recorded directly.

This sample pack contains the drum sounds from the YM2413 sound chip, when configured as recommend by Yamaha in the application manual. The audio has been recorded directly from hardware.

1. Sega Master System YM2413 Preset Instruments
2. Sega Master System YM2413 Drums
3. Sega Master System SN76489
4. Sega Mega Drive YM2612
5. SPo256-AL2 Speech Chip Allophones
6. Atari POKEY Noise
7. Atari 2600 TIA

Multi band BIT Crusher VST

There are thousands of bit-crusher plugins and most of them don't add anything important to the ones shipped with most sequencer applications. This one adds something: multi band support!

Multiband Bitcrusher I is a multiple bitcrush & downsample plug-in. It selects 4 frequency bands from the incoming signal - Low; Middle Low; Middle High; High - and then processes them through the bitcrusher and/or the grinder. Frequency cut-off point for each band is selectable in a variable range depending on the band; unselected frequencies are cut.

DOWNLOAD

ROLAND TR-909 BASS DRUM RECORDED THROUGH 13 DISTORTION UNITS from thegearfiend.com

This is something yummy to repost: the TR-909 bassdrum sampled through some distortion units:

I recorded a TR-909 Bass Drum through the following distortion units to compare and contrast the sounds.

1) Dunlop Fuzz Face
2) Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff with Top Boost
3) Maxon OD-9
4) Boss OS-2
5) Boss DS-1
6) Boss DS-2
7) Pro Co RAT
8) Tech 21 VT Bass
9) MXR Bass D.I. +
10) Electro-Harmonix English Muff'n
11) Moog Moogerfooger Lowpass Filter
12) Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff Pi
13) Elektron SidStation

I like  this way of sampling because it involves both the Roland TR-909 and some BOSS pedals although I wish the guy had sampled it through 13 distortion units IN A ROW!! :)
Besides this, my favorite distortion comes from the Elektron SidStation: I love the SID background noise in action.

MORE INFO AND DOWNLOAD

TR-505 thorough BOSS METAL ZONE samples

I'm glad finally someone replied to my call for material for the blog
Today Dj Quartzlocker sent me these samples he made running a Roland TR-505 thorough a BOSS METAL ZONE pedal

The MT-2 Metal Zone™ is one of BOSS' most popular pedals. This stompbox provides some of the most over-the-top, insane distortion tones in the world—with huge mids and lows and an ultra-saturated sound. 

The 505 works well with a computer and sequencer or as a stand alone drum machine. It is extremely basic and unexciting but does make a good starter or play-along drum machine. Vince Clarke and Aphex Twin has used the 505.

I'm happy of this combo because I used to own both devices but not simultanously so I never had the chance to make any samplekit with them. This also confirms what I said about pedals in the past.

DOWNLOAD

Reverb in Industrial Music

Reverberation is a key effect in Industrial Music, it has the double purpose of both clean or dirty up the sounds.

Research in Industrial Music is often performed through deep distortion and heavy processing of sounds which sometimes lead to inconsistency, lack of harmonics and general dullness: characteristics that make the sound itself easily masked in the mix by other, more powerful, instruments. Here a good reverb can help the sound be perceived again.

The other employment is quite the reverse process, by reverberating some sound and adding distortion afterwards it's possible to dirty up material otherwise too clean for the Industrial freaks.

Personally I am using both analog and VST reverb units because for an effect of such importance I need a choice as wide as possible.

As outboard I got an oldschool ALT Multiverb LTX:

which has the harsh sound I am looking for. It works with just presets but once found the good ones it's ready to rock. Indeed it's connected right after a Spring Reverb, developing a nice metallic sound.


On the ITB side I've tried thousand different VST but at the moment in my opinion two are the best: the Omniverb 2.0.2

and the reverberation section from the Space Echo VST


They both work great as a pre-distortion processing technique but the Tape Echo works a bit better than Omniverb for post-distortion.