.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

Utterly distorted Japanese vocal samples

Obviously my PSX emulator needs some fixes on the sound driver configuration. Obviously I’m not going to fix it, because it creates some stunning distortions!



I realized this when I tried to run an old Japanese videogame, the music was ok but the voices were all gritty. The misconfigured audio driver had a “save to disk” option so it was easy to obtain a .WAV file with all the sounds recorded. A DC-Offset removal was definitely needed to be able to normalize the samples.

So I compiled this collection of utterly distorted Japanese vocals that will sound perfect in any Industrial composition.

DEMO

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Interesting blog with industrial and noise samples

This blog from russian techno producer Dmitry Vasilyev is full of free sample packs.



Of course my attention has focused on the following tags:

• www.rhythm-lab.com/tags/lo-fi


• www.rhythm-lab.com/tags/glitch


• www.rhythm-lab.com/tags/noise


• www.rhythm-lab.com/tags/distorted

But the blog has more samples to offer as well as free VSTs plugins and resources. Worth checking!

Laptop Hell v. 01.1 for Reaktor

Here's a great new ensemble for Reaktor, the Laptop Hell!



As the graphics let figure out it develops some lovely noisy timbres, not too harsh but more towards the metallic.

The graphics are hard to see - but you really don't need to worry about such trivial matters. Just click on buttons, move knobs and sliders, and have fun!

While the GUI is quite straightforward inside the hood there is a cool mess just waiting to be further tweaked by users.



If you're into Industrial Music and still don't have NI Reaktor get it because you can't miss this instrument!

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Metallic noises with AKAI S900

Hot nights have become cold and now are slowly fading to freezing. I'm not used to the new season yet so it's too early to compose music. Sampling safaris are the right activity. Like an ant at the beginning of the autumn I am storing new samples to be used during the winter...

Today I spent a nice evening in front of my AKAI S900, a sampler widely known and appreciated for its metallic timbre, dumping via MIDI a few metallic sounds.




Playing them back at different pitches with weird looping points creates some new raw materials.

A good denoising stage was required to remove the sampler background noise and to obtain some usable audio textures that I am going to share.

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Radio Effect VSTi

More VSTi noisy craziness from the Japanese website. I'm not stunned about that knowing how a strong noise culture Japan has, since it gave birth to a band like The GeroGeriGeGeGe...



This plug-in emulates the tuning of a radio set. You can load samples that will be your "stations" and tune the radio to them with the usual knob. Sounds simple, but the implementation in industrial music are wide.

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Nipponic Noise Generator VSTi

I am being totally wasted by this VSTi plug-in:



It comes from this Japanese website with no information except for a Youtube video:

Anyway any information wouldn't be very useful...as the rest of the website is written in the language of rising sun!

Good enough the author added some very detailed information on the GUI itself in the amount of... none! All we know is that there are five stages of... something with cutoffs and volumes. Four additional unnamed slider have shown to be an ADSR envelope and a "FILE" button will ask us for a .WAV to load. Our choice here is not very important as it will serve only as seed for some noise generation.

As long as a note is played the instrument sounds continuously, generating powerful metallic drones.


There are more VSTs there which look interesting. Will be posting about them also!

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Beat Burner VST

More interesting chopping solution are coming out finally, this one from Lee Stacey is the most interesting after Dblue Glitch came out six years ago.



It acts as a sample based synth but centrifuges the waveforms as if in a blender. Something that IDM and Industrial freaks out there will love.

BeatBurner VSTi is a synthesizer plugin which generates its output by processing wav files. These files can be anything from percussive loops to vocals. This output is produced by passing the sound through a number of modules including a synthesis module, a number of variable filters, a waveshaper and some effects.

All of the processing is synchorinzed to the wav file which is looped. This can in turn be synchronized to the host.

The degree of sound degradation is sometimes embarrassing and what is outputted is often quite uncontrollable, so it is advisable to use it by bouncing out audio and cutting only the most interesting bits.



Any kind of sound can be loaded but I found it more effective with metallic ones as they make it act like a "metallic synth"...

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Weird Noise Machine VST Plugin WNM-1

I am recently spending many nights and afternoons exploring WNM-1 plugin:

Six osc's on each module, first five are modulators and can be routed to other osc's. * Sine, Saw, Ramp, Triangle, Pulse, w-noise and p-noise waveforms to choose from.

The best feature, beyond being totally insane in the concept, is the fact that every OCS has a different stereo output. So it's possible to further process the separated material with any other effects chain.

Every Oscillator can be set to "Track" the pitch of your music keyboard, this allow you to either make every note to have the same timbre but diff pitch or just add more weirdness.

The resulting sound is a bit thin, reminds me NI Reaktor's output, but the differences in sound nuance and its modulation capabilities are amazing enough to make it a good ally to generate some Industrial landscapes.

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HASK Sampled feedbacks

My friend Hask Haskore is into Techno and Schranz since ages. His small studio is crammed with cool analog stuff and one day I asked him to make a few industrial samples for my blog.



There are many industrial things that can be done with his hardware:

Jomox X-Base 09
Akai XE8
Yamaha TX81-Z
Spectral Audio Neptune
Elka EM-44
Aria AR-525
Zoom 9150
Zoom 2100
Alesis 3630 Compressor
Boss OD-2r Turbo Overdrive
Boss Flanger BF-3

...so more posts are planned...

But what best to begin with than a bounce of crazy feedbacks?

All the samples came with a exaustive explaination on how they were obtained:

Feedbacks 1,2,3,4: Alesis 3630 Dual Channel Compressor/Limiter with gate with manipulation of Threshold and Ratio and filtered on the Neptune Spectral Audio Analog Synthesizer.

Feedback 5: Boss Turbo Overdrive OD-2r thorough Neptune and reverberated with Aria AR-525 Stereo Spring Reverb Unit.

Feedbacks 6,7,10: Zoom 9150 Valve DSP thorough Neptune plus additional feedback from Boss Turbo Overdrive OD-2r and reverberated with Aria AR-525 Stereo Spring Reverb Unit

Feedback 8,9: Same as 6-7-10 with no reverb but compression.

Something worth mentioning here is that since all sweeps are live performed he ran our of...hands... and had to borrow one from his father to tweak three knobs simultaneously. I like when doing music becomes a family affair :)

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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.

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KORG MS-20 VS BLACK AUDIO DESTRUCTOR Samples

"Me next! Me next!!"... this is what the KORG MS-20 seemed to shout after seeing me sampling the JoMoX thorough the Black Audio Destructor! The big old toy is on the list of the borrowed things, so anytime I can get a phone call that will take it away from me. Since I know that I will be committing suicide when this happens, I decided to exploit it a bit more.



So I spent a nice evening filtering the KORG MS-20 thorough the BAD, trying some unusual (actually ranging from weird to completely insane) patches including the outputs of the White and Pink noises.

In this collection of industrial sounds all samples are in MONO but I advise to couple similar sounds together into a STEREO file for some nice spatial effects.


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BLISTER Distortion VST

I stumbled upon this VST plug-in from TLR while doing a techno track a few days ago. Itself it's a nice piece of software but the characteristic that has cached my attention is its SERIABILITY.



Usually distortion plug-ins, after putting two or three of the same in the same track, sound nothing more that a big squared waveform. This plug-in starts to make interesting sounds after three or more instances are loaded in the same track. This is probably because of the oscillator there's inside:

Something important to mention here is the utilization of a Synthedit module called NewWave (by Ralph Gonzalez). Basically it detects an input frequency and then uses that information to spit out a synthy waveform based upon it. This technology works
much better when used along with a very simple input signal.

I arrived at five instances on a single track and actually getting some fun artifacts.

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MP3 encoding artefacts as a creative effect

Lossy encoding creates unwanted and weird effects. The MP3 codec tries to recreate the full frequency spectrum regardless of the encoding frequency, so at very low values it develops weird artifacts that I always found interesting in a creative way.

I've been looking for a VST plugin that encodes and decodes audio in MP3 format but it seems like it doesn't exists. Also normal codecs like LAME or Fraunhofer don't create enough artifacts to satisty my needs except the one that comes with Macromedia/Adobe Flash.



Also older version work as far as they can import WAVS.

Here is how it can be done:
Load up the .WAV into the library and put it into timeline. Edit the properties and start playing a little. Basically very low frequency work well for this. It is possible to load single tracks or entire mixes, but more variegated material will create more fractalization after the encoding.

Export the .SWF and use something to convert it back to .WAV. This appears to work well but there are surely alternatives to test out also on other platforms.

Put the result together with the original track on your preferred audio sequencer and start mixing them. You really don't need to be an EQ wizard to be able to enhance the artifacts frequencies.

This is the .SWF version of my latest song (just as an example). The resulting file is less that 300kb, so it is clear that the codec is "inventing" back most of the audio!

The AKAIZER Project

Akaizer v1.7
+--------------------------------------------------+
|    _____   __            __                      |
|   /  _  \ |  | _______  |__|_______ ___________  |
|  /  /_\  \|  |/ /\__  \ |  \___   // __ \_  __ \ |
| /    |    \    <  / __ \|  |/    /\  ___/|  | \/ |
| \____|__  /__|_ \(____  /__/_____ \\___  >__|    |
|         \/     \/     \/         \/    \/        |
|                                                  |
+--------------------------------------------------+
Copyright (c) 2005-2010 Ben Burchett

I discovered this little piece of software thanks to the author, Ben Burchett, who posted about it on a comment on my other blog about AKAI S900



Its aim is quite simple: emulate the time stretch function of old AKAI samplers.

Akaizer is a freeware audio processing tool which can 'time stretch' any 8/16/24/32-bit WAV sound file in the style of the 'cyclic mode' time stretch, which featured on old Akai sound samplers, like the S950 / S1000 / S2000 / S3000 series.
This is ideal for computer-based dance music producers who want that classic metallic-sounding time stretch effect, as used in many old school Jungle / Drum and Bass / Speed Garage tunes from the 1990's, without the need for an actual Akai sampler.

Since it claims to make " that classic metallic-sounding time stretch effect " I immediately tested it by slaughtering some samples out of my JoMoX X-Base 09 kit.
The results are convincing: percussive material gains lot of craziness and I haven't tried with voices yet! Anyone serious in Industrial sound research should give it a try.

Find it for Windows and other platforms here: http://akaizer.blogspot.com/

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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.

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Ferox tape saturation modeller VST plugin

I mentally divide distortion effects into two breeds: simple audio "inflaters" and "spicers". "Spicers" are the ones that can add "spice", usually with a knob that sums some kind of harsh noise.

This VST plug-in from the same author of Timemachine is definitely of the second, more rare, breed. It doesn't produce raw sounds only by exploding the existing waveforms but can add something of its own with the usual "noise" knob.



I found it effective on both long synths and short percussive material.

Ferox is a free tape saturation modeller VST plugin. It has separate controls for saturation and hysteresis effects. Feedback with variable tape speed is provided to simulate vintage tape echos.

Nice to see that it also does its original job flawlessly: an analog tape emulator.

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Vanguard VST Industrial Presets

Many readers of this blog showed interest on the post about Vanguard VST. In particular they're asking me where to find some Industrial presets.



As far as I know there are any of them around the Internet, commercial or free, except a few one on my harddisk!

In short, here's my collection of Industrial presets for Vanguard Volume One!

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My BLACK AUDIO DESTRUCTOR is on its way!

This nice piece of hardware from Circuitsbenders should be at my door in a day or two! I expect to spend all my weekend using it to process harsh percussions out of a JoMoX X-Base09!

Essentially this small black box eats audio alive, then chews it up and spits it out in what can only be described as a deeply offensive manner. Basically its a wrong'un! The box can create a wide range of bitcrushing style, gating, distortion and synthlike frequency effects with an intensity that can be anything from a gentle thin crunch to a terrifying wall of unstoppable noise.

"...a terrifying wall of unstoppable noise." ...YESS!!

Sampled feedbacks and larsens pt.1

Feedback is a creative key widely used in industrial music. I always find exciting to real-time feedback signals from and to various analog devices!



Its beauty remains intact also in the digital domain where further processing is possible. My friend Giulius spoke me about his hobby of sampling larsens and timestretching them until a total disturbing resonance is achieved. In a few days a DVD with four gigabytes of sampled stuff was spinning in my drive.

It's taking a while to select the worst out of it but I really think it's worth doing because the resulting material is really nice and will be useful.

Here is part 1 (11mb):

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