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

Alesis SR-16 through BOSS OVERDRIVE samples

As promised in this post this is the first Industrial samplekit made with the Alesis SR-16 thru a BOSS Turbo Overdrive OD-2r pedal (a classic!)



The noise "problem" of my unit sounds great when distorted and this can be heard clearly on every single hit. The best sounds came out of Toms and Snares.

I sampled the whole instruments list using this great editor:


Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD

Rhythmus rhythm machine VST

This is a nice rhythm machine VST but beyond its normal use I have found the sounds blend lovely after a few layers of distortion.

Rhythmus is inspired by an old rhythm machine. There are ten buttons available, each button can play two different rhythm sections so essentially there are about 20 different rhythmic loops offered, such as samba, mambo, tango, waltz, rumba etc.

Even if Mamba, Rumba or Tango have not much to do with industrial music the mixture of the sounds in the kits have a coherence which is the reason of the nice blending.


At the end this plug-in is good for adding a bit of groove to some heavy kickdrums.

Surprisingly, it's been developed with Synthedit!

DOWNLOAD AND MORE INFO (Link fixed)

Alesis SR-16 Drummachine

I got an Alesis SR-16, cheaply, from E-bay. Something that makes me totally happy is that hitting the pads outputs distorted sounds. Lucky me, I got a self-circuit bending unit for the price of a faulty one!! This reminds me of a TR-909 I owned back in the nineties which had the hi-tom section broken and would output just a white noise, obeying to MIDI note-ons and offs... inspiring!



During my early years of music making I started to collaborate with an industrial/noise band called "Gennaio". They were four guitarists and an Alesis SR-16 as a drummer and my role should have been to replace the drummachine playing live with my Amiga computer.

The project never went too far but I had the chance to hear the SR-16 cold and reverberated sound in action and it sounded deeply industrial. This sentence from vintagesynth.com just confirms it:

No doubt the SR-16 is a powerful drum machine, but ultimately it also sounds like a drum machine. [...] But all those bumper stickers about drum machines having no soul just might be directed at the SR-16.

After a full day of use I compiled a list of useful instruments:

"Rock 1" Good toms
"Rock 2" Dirty kick
"Rock 3" Mid tom very good
"Rock 4" Low tom very good
"Rock 5" Nice reverb kick
"Rock 6" Good toms
"Rock 7" Cool crash
"Hard Rock 1" Nothing interesting
"Hard Rock 2" Kick and crash
"Hard Rock 3" Great snare!
"R&B 1" Forget it :)
"R&B 2" YAhn!
"R&B 3" Nice kick and snare!
"Funk 1" Crash ok
"Funk 2" Kick and rimshot
"Blues 1" All nice sounds
"Blues 2" Sparkling crash
"Rap 1" 808esque kick, tom 1 and 2 are some good noises
"Rap 2" Kick and snare
"Rap 3" kick ok, metallic snare, tom 3 very deep and dirty
"Techno 1" Besides the name, only a good snare here
"Techno 2" Good kick and great metallic snare!
"Techno 3" Tom 3 sounds powerful
"Reggae 1" ehm...
"Reggae 2" uhm...
"Jazz Rock 1" Snare ok but claps are better
"Jazz Rock 2" Tom and crash but like other banks basically
"Fusion 1" Good dry kick
"Fusion 2" Good toms
"New Age 1" Cutting open hat and good snare
"New Age 2" Kick and snare but like others
"Country 1" Leave it
"Country 2" Leave it
"Country 3" Leave...
"Country Rock" The sounds tends to repeat...
"Rockabilly" Good snare with reverb
"Jazz 1" Quiet stuff
"Jazz 2" You won't buy a unit for this
"Dixie" Dirty kick
"Polka" Quite useless
"Latin 1" Dry kick
"Latin 2" Repeated sounds
"Latin 3" Good Tom 1
"Latin 4" Nahh
"Latin 5" Claps have a strange snare, not bad
"Ballad 1" Snare with long reverb!
"Ballad 2" Again Claps have a disorted percussion
"Ballad 3" Another long snare
"Ballad 4" More long snare
"Ballad 5" Even longer snare and reverb on toms

With this unit I am definitely going to make some sample kits like:

• Alesis sampled into Amiga @ 8-BIT


• Alesis sampled thru BOSS Overdrive


• Alesis sampled thru Black Audio Destructor

Anyone interested in some fresh Industrial percussions should stay tuned...

Building an Analog drum module

I just received everything I need to build my own Analog Drum Module:



Someone managed to convince me that by doing this I will be a even cooler musician, so here I am...digging on resistors, diodes, wires and meaningless boards!



The module is a DS7 Drum Synce (DC860)and the smaller one is a simple Gate To Trigger Converter.

The DS7 Drum Synce (DC860) is a little analog percussion synthesizer from the 80's made by CORON. This drumsynth was dedicaced to drummers : the DS7 was fixed on the border of a drum to be played/triggered by hitting the drum.

The DS7 contain a VCO +VCA chain. The VCO is modulated by a cheesy LFO and a simple decay envelope trigged by the piezzo cell pulse. The cell work as a pressure/hit sensor. It can be replaced by a jack to be used with any kind of trigg pulses or even gates. In this case the "decay" pot become a "Release" pot ... The VCA is directly controled by the envelope. The LFO can drive the VCO from slow modulation to hi-speed to produce FM like sounds.

I needed some new analog raw meat for the distortion chain... let's see how long it takes to build it :)

Some Kickdrum samples with PAiA modules

The blog has been dormant for a while due to personal music production priorities. However I am collecting stuff from people sending me suggestions so I plan to post a little more from now on.

My friend Furio loves analog modular systems. He builds his own modules from kits often modding them to suit his needs. We've been talking about the employ of such machinery into modern industrial music and the end was that he should have done a few samples for the blog, so here we are with some Modular Kickdrums.

This is how the chain has been set up:


PAiA 9720 Dual VCO / MODULATION

Dark Side SSM2044 VCF/VCO

A-132-3 Dual linear/exponential VCA

The results are some clean and punchy kicks, ready to be slaughtered with the most inhuman distortion techniques!

Il modulatore è praticamente un inviluppo AR con attenuatore, settabile via switch in modalità LFO che modula in continuo un VCO. L'Attacco corto, da l'effetto dell'impatto e il Relese più lungo, la sensazione di coda della vibrazione di membrana e corpo della cassa.

L'onda modulata è filtrata in un VCF SSM2044 per aggiungere carattere, dinamica e risonanza. Dal VCF ho passato il suono in un VCA in tecnologia CEM usato per aggiungere ulteriore carattere e regolare la preamplificazione, prima di entrare nei Pre e Convertitori ADC AKM standard/onboard della scheda audio (ultra low jitter) RME HDSP2496.

I suoni son stati prima Campionati in un unico file e poi frammentati i campionamenti in questi file distribuiti, su SO GNU/Linux e Editor Audio FOSS, via server audio JACK@ALSA che permette controllare e sapere di non aver avuto perdite di dati nel flusso audio.

The sounds have been sampled in pristine quality with a high resolution audio server and here they are provided in both 32/96 and 24/44.1 formats.

DOWNLOAD

TLR D15 Analog Drum Machine VST

When doing music not tonally one focuses more and more on drums and percussions. Kickdrums, when it comes to me, but generally speaking not only them. This is why I always try to test the wider range of drum machines possible.

This VST plug-in from TLR, the same authors of Blister, sounds weird enough to satisfy the said need of Industrial stomps and hits.

Fully customizable, analog modeling drum machine (no samples!). Each sound is tunable, opening the doors for drastically different drum kit presets. The amplifier stage contains a tube simulator with pre and post gain as well as a clean output.

DOWNLOAD

HESED Industrial sample-kit

Claudio Hesed is a true analog freak, maybe even more than me! He's into tekno and electro since ages and composes his music using the Atari ST. An Italian citizen but moved to Germany years ago: a choice I should have done too...

Live pa and Producer of Electro,Experimental,Hip-hop,Tekno,Hardcore and much more.
Start to make and study music with 8 years old playing guitar in 1997 first contact with electronic music (ambient,electro), in 1998 start djing and producing with hardware. 2000 start to collect all atari machine possible ;-).
2004 start to work for Magix (music&video software) and learnt about mastering. Also making Sound Design for video, spot, theather and more.
Founder of Analog Tecne Model records label.

He makes some weird and unusual sample kits for Prokits.co.uk mainly from circuitsbend machine.

I asked him to send me some Industrial sounds and what I finally got is a beautiful set of DRM syncussion (HDB/Vermona) sampled through Metasonix R53 Vacuum-Tube Waveshaper which he agreed to publish on my blog!

DRM Filtered Kit

70 Samples recorded from analog devices.

45 Drum - 12 Snares - 8 Claps - 4 Hihat - 1 Special

The samples are coming out of a DRM syncussion (HDB/Vermona)
and filtered with Metasonix R53 Vacuum-Tube Waveshaper modul.

So download the kit and say THANX to Claudio!

DOWNLOAD

More sample kits from HESED

JoMoX percussions through Black Audio Destructor samples

The Black Audio Destructor (BAD!) does exactly what its name suggests: destroys audio! Anything fed is reduced to shreds.

The mode switch selects between Crunch mode, Saturated mode and Tone mode. In every mode the audio is distorted and ground up at a frequency selected by the frequency knob, Selecting Crunch mode with the switch in the upwards position gives a spluttering crunchy distorted sound that can sound like anything from an old fuzz pedal with a nearly dead battery, to a mixing desk with every light running in the red. In Saturated mode with the switch in the central position you get a much more intense effect, where the input signal and the effect signal start to blend into one mighty noise. In this mode you can get brutally saturated and distorted synth like tones running at the frequency of the input signal. The final mode is the Tone mode with the switch in the downward position. In this mode the box starts playing a constant tone at certain settings, with the input signal interacting with the tone in bizarre ways. With an input signal as a sweeping synth waveform we have managed to get pseudo ring modulator tones in this mode.

To test its full potential I needed something with a fierce output, something analog that can withstand this degree of audio degradation. A JoMoX X-Base 09 would be perfect!



So I borrowed the one from my friend Hask and started to experiment with snares, kickdrums and different layerings of them together, to see where how far the boundaries of harshness were.

The result is a unique and huge collection of Industrial hits, suitable for Powernoise, Techno, and maybe some hard EBM.

DOWNLOAD

Vermona DRM-1 MKII through AKAI S900 samples

All my musician friends, sooner or later, end up by borrowing me some gear. I still don't have understood why this happen but for sure it makes me happy! This time I had a Vermona for about one week from my friend Fede of System Reboot.



As usual my explorations were in the industrial direction. I found the Vermona very interesting for heavy percussions, besides kickdrums, so I decided to sample it through my beloved AKAI S900 to further enhance this attitude.

The brand Vermona also produces other cool stuff, like analog filters and even springs reverb! I'd like that some friend of mine get some of them so that, sooner or later, they end up by borrowing them to me :)

And again, the very best selection from my sampling safaris is shared:

DOWNLOAD