Mini-505 KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | 4.11 MB

When it comes to drum machines, Roland have been in on the action right from the start. With the TR-808, they helped define EDM and hip-hop, while the 909 swiftly became a staple of the techno / house movement. But by 1986, old analogue beatboxes were making way (sometimes by being slung in skips) for the crispy ‘realism’ of digitally sampled drums. Everyone and their drummer cousin wanted a set of Simmons pads and a brain, and of course Roland were only too happy to provide. Cue the TR-505, a smaller and more plasticky drum machine than its big brothers, but sporting 12-bit sampled sounds that brought a whole new mood to the mix at an attainable price-point – and immediately found itself a niche with the emergent acid scene. The TR-505 has a thuddy great kick that responds very nicely to compression, a light and crispy snare sound, some really neat percussive elements (including congas, timbales, claves, rim shots and the inevitable cowbell), and of course those fizzy, zingy sampled cymbals that put the old brigade of drum machine in the shade. Factor in tight hats and some very 80s toms and you’ve got yourself a little powerhouse capable of shunting out big-feel beats on a garage-friendly budget.

CX5 Drum Machine KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | 2.75 MB

The Wersi Drum Composer CX5 is an early digital drum machine with a punchy, aggressive sound that was clearly intended to poach on Simmons’s territory. Physically, it’s a monolithic slab of grey metal and plastic livened up by dozens of LEDs and a cool, Ensoniq-style vacuum fluorescent display; sonically, its low-bit-depth samples make for gritty, compressed loops that can add a really hefty foundation to a track. (It’s no relation to the Yamaha CX5 music computer, by the way; that’s a totally different monolithic slab of grey mid-80s metal and plastic!) Released back in 1985 and intended for use either as a standalone drum machine or as a “brain” for a set of Wersi drum pads – they really were hoping to cannibalise some SDS sales! – the CX5 is surprisingly sophisticated in terms of programming and pattern creation and has a very useful spread of samples: both classic kit pieces and a couple of notable surprises, in the form of the ‘Hey!’ and ‘Aha’ hits (take a listen to the demo…). The early digital sound lends a lot of weight to the kick and tom pieces, while hi hats and cymbals have a nice fizz and crackle to them. There are snare rolls, some pretty awesome claps, and a handful of neat percussion pieces thrown in too, which are great for adding a Latin element to your loops.

PatchVault 770 KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | 840 MB

MERRY XMAS!

All 24 ‘InstaSet’ presets faithfully copied from the Korg 770’s original manual…

• …plus a further 16 ‘Mongo Specials’ faithfully copied from the sweltering, febrile brain of Mongo • Simple but powerful control set including Tilt EQ, Filter and Amplifier so you can craft your own sounds • Velocity-to-volume and Velocity-to-cutoff retrofitted for even more expressive options • Classic sounds for 20c per patch! The Korg 770 may be small, but it’s mighty – not in a MiniMoog way, more in a BBC Radiophonics Workshop synth-puppy way. From a handful of wires and diodes comes all manner of frankly amazing and wonderful sounds, thanks to some pretty barmy topology and a whole load of unusual surprises: the Chorus wave on Oscillator 1, or the two forms of ring modulation built right in, or the musically brilliant Scale Noise which we’re now nicking and building into all our new synths. (Why doesn’t Scale Noise turn up everywhere? It’s amazing!)

Music Box KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | 92 MB

Long before the Rhodes piano made tines rock’n’roll, little resonating metal bars were called lamellae and were to be found lurking below the ornately-carved exteriors of Victorian musical boxes. Some of these clockwork devices were extraordinarily intricate, involving moving figures that twirled, danced, made gestures or appeared to speak before retiring into concealment. Larger mechanisms might have removable and replaceable drums, allowing you to play different tunes (possibly the earliest example of the hot-swappable storage drive?!). All of them were more or less crude attempts to bring the music of the symphony or chamber orchestra home to the individual consumer, to be set going whenever you might wish (so, possibly the precursor of the iPod, too…) Music Box celebrates this decidedly clockwork heritage but – of course – welds in some more contemporary strangeness along the way. At its core, Music Box is sampled from a 3-octave professional musical mechanism which runs its tunes from punched paper rolls, like a player piano, instead of a drum. This lets the user create whatever tune they wish, with a little paper punch. (We opted for a 3-octave scale – not very exciting, but good for sampling!) To record this, we clamped it to the soundboard of our Takamine acoustic guitar, tuned the open strings in unison, and put a capo on the neck in tune with whichever note we were sampling – so the guitar body adds a hefty dose of musically-relevant resonance to the initial pluck of the lamellae.

Spectalk KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | 20 MB

MERRY XMAS!

R-O-B-O-T V-O-I-C-E-S! Need we say more?

We can’t leave our Sinclair ZX Spectrum alone. Not only can it do awesome drums (see SpecDrum 2000) and print rude messages about your mates on shiny thermal paper, it can also do RO-BOT VOI-CES! That’s right, we got ourselves a Currah MicroSpeech attachment for the Speccie. This little black plastic box of tricks did for voice synthesis what the SpecDrum did for drum sampling: that is, slotted it right into the back of your home computer. Once the MicroSpeech was installed, every key press you made on the Spectrum’s boingy rubber keys was announced through your TV speaker in glorious, robotic monotone. RUN. EN-TER. SPACE. BREAK. B-B-B-B-BREAK. Being in charge of a talking Spectrum is the next best thing to piloting the Starship Enterprise. Probably.

NanoMod 10 Hard KONTAKT

P2P | 25.12.2018 | 123.01 MB

Hard puts the NanoMod architecture to work on hard-hitting, metallized, aggressive waveforms to give you a wide variety of powerful leads and angry basslines. It’s ideally suited to sounds that need to cut through a mix assertively. Wave 1 comes from our modular system and harnesses the SuperSawtor to great effect, generating a brash, thick sawtooth wave which we’ve harnessed to a chunky square-wave sub-oscillator before pushing them both through our Aurora Stinger at a rather high gain setting. This wave is angry but thick-sounding and is great for basses and polysynth tones. Wave 2 also got pushed through the Stinger for some class-A saturation, but the starting point this time was a Metallized triangle wave coupled with a beefy sine-based sub-oscillator. Harder and more cutting than Wave 1, it’s ideal for leads, and gives the filters a lot to chew on.

NanoMod 9 Hats KONTAKT

P2P | 25.12.2018 | 9.64 MB

NanoMod Hats rounds out the components of our ‘NanoMod Drumkit’ with some high-frequency fizz and clank. The eight source waves here range from typical analogue white-noise hisses through various more complex, metallic tones to a couple of low-bit-depth digital sounds – for when you want a more realistic hats track which still retains a bit of vintage flavour. Tweaking the Tone control can really add some sparkle, while the Grit Filter at its higher cutoff settings dials in attitude without killing the edge. As always, hitting the Glitch button gives you an endless supply of new and inspiring (or just plain mad) variations to play with, from reversed cabasa-like tones to doom-laden gongs and tiny frenzied clinks. Get clicking!