.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

Delfy Creations hand-made electronic musical contraptions

These guys from the UK develop some really nice hand-made synthesizers and effects.

We have a range of 'Delfy Originals' which we sell all the time, and we also sell one-off items, ranging from original circuits to circuit bent toys and instruments!

The boxes look great with those industrial-like cases and they're quite cheap, altought the SSVC-1 v2, my favorite, costs a little more than the others.

The SSVC-1 v2 consists of two parts, one being a circuit bent voice changer, and the other a squarewave oscillator circuit, using the same circuitry as the Delfy SS-1 with added features like a photoresistor you can use like a theremin!

The SS-1 is also worth checking, being the cheaper and most straightforward in use.

The SS-1 is the most popular of all our creations. It's very hands-on and easy to use, while also capable of a huge variety of squeals and squelches.

I'm sure these little tools are great for Industrial sounds! The guys should really send me one over for a review :)

http://www.delfycreations.com/

VSTron VST for laser sounds

Being in the need of a VST to produce some laser sounds today I googled "vst for laser sounds" and found this:

VSTron is an effective and fun VST unit that is capable of producing different kinds of effects such as Laser sounds , Fast LFO's , Ascending/Descending Sweeps , Filtered madness , Bubbling Bleeps or attacking Ramps.
Initially inspired by the Korg Monotron the VSTron includes 1 Osc ( Saw , Sine , Triangle , Ramp , Pulse , White Noise and Pink Noise ) and 1 VCF Osc with 4 modes ( Low Pass , High Pass , Band Pass , Band Reject ) as well as 1 Main Envelope.

The sound generated is thick and fat and will not fear the deepest degrees of distrortion!


MORE INFO
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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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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.

INFO + DOWNLOAD

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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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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Real-time Graphical Synthesis

RGS (Real-time Graphical Synthesis) is a sonic spectrum editor that runs on Classic Amiga computers.



I's very old (1991), but the concept behind it has never been developed much further during the past twenty years so I consider it still interesting.

It allows you to paint a sonogram using specialized 'brushes' and then synthesize the corresponding audio waveform. [...] The main added features in RGS are that there are now 256 levels of amplitude to choose from and the ability to synthesize while you are drawing in nearly real time.

When I was composing and experimenting merely with an Amiga this program was a big discover for industrial sounds as it produces strange noises and drones. Spectral analysis is a powerful method for discovering underlying structures in sounds and being able to draw your own is truly stimulating. However, even writing your own name or randomly draw harmonics can result in very interesting sounds.



RGS can be run on a real or emulated Amiga and can be found here and documentation here.

As usual, I made a collection of .WAVs samples of me exploring the program:
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KORG MS-20 Industrial Sounds

I'm borrowing a KORG MS-20 from my friends Armageddon Project. They're focusing more and more on just digital music so they felt like I would really employ it more than them so since two years the unit is in my studio.



This machine really needs no introduction as it is one of the most wanted analog vintage synthesizers of all times!

Even if I own a full MIDI2CV interface from Kenton the main use in my studio is as a filter, wired to a send of the mixer.

Another good use for it is for sound research and sampling safaris: here is a collection of Industrial Sounds in .WAV format done with it and with further analog processing.

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Commodore 64 background noise synth

This kit is obtained by mapping on a Kontakt program a sampled background noise of a SID 6581, the sound chip of the mighty Commodore 64.



The result, quite surprising, is a harmonic sound that resembles a synthesizer.

Must be said that the pre-amp circuitry of the Commodore 64 is responsible for the fat sound but it's nice to obtain instruments from signals that weren't meant to produce useful sounds.

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AKAI S900 as a Granular Synthesizer

The AKAI S900 is a wonderful machine for Industrial Music due to its harsh and powerful sounding 12bit AD-DA converters, so good I even run a BLOG about it!

During the last years I've been using it deeply in my productions and I've being experimenting the weirdest ways to employ it: from a distortion effect unit to a drum module.

Recently I've done an experiment with granular synthesis, small sampled waveforms looped to obtain a continuos sound.



I chopped some waveforms from my Roland SH-09 samplekit and MIDI dumped them into the AKAI S900. Usually I care about samples dimension as the S900 has only 720kB of unexpandable memory but sample waveforms, or "grains", are so small in size there's really no worry.

The waveforms sound quite close to the real SH-09, even when layering together the squarewave + SUBOSC the result is similar. What starts to go crazy is when I hit two different keys, blending two sounds at different pitches: the AKAI poliphony starts to show its limits so the harshness is guaranteed.

Being the SH-09 a typical techno machine the resulting sounds are quite oldschoolish but the screaming effects are of course totally different: here it's the AKAI S900 character showing off.

Of course this kind of experiment can be done with any waveform or with any sampler.

Here's a downloadable archive with the floppy .IMG for the lucky friends that own an AKAI S900 and the waveforms in .WAV format for anyone who wants to experiment with SH-09 waveforms with Kontakt or whatever.

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Two good reasons to use Vanguard VST in industrial music

Looking for some Vanguard Industrial presets?

When talking about "industrial sounds" it's very easy to talk about distorting effects and noisy samples while sound generators are much more rare topics so time to find out some of them.

We all well know Vanguard from ReFX, one of the best VST synthesizers around. But Vanguard is not only an instant Trance generator as it might be seen by most of its users.



There are two good reasons one can use Vanguard in an industrial production.
First it develops some oldschool electro leads, a-la Front 242, that makes it suitable for classic Industrial/EBM tunes.
Second reason is it sounds thick and warm, a perfect signal to be heavily processed with the worst distortion chain!

This plug-in features an incredible amount of good presets to start with as well as more free and commercial banks. Its arpeggiator can be configured in a large variety of ways, from melodic leads to mechanical and monotonic noises.

The trance gate is another nice feature and its name shouldn't fool because if well configured it can give more spice to our beloved raw waveforms.