Regal Rhythm KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | 6.86 MB

Regal Rhythm is a very simple drum box with a typical vintage analogue sound. The six on-board preset rhythms cover the kind of staples you’d expect from more of a home-orientated (rather than studio grade) piece of kit, and there’s a slightly fuzzy, soft-edged tone to the whole thing that can work very nicely for chillout, downtempo tracks. It also comes in a neat royal red colour scheme that should cheer up anyone’s morning – and check out that real wood veneer ???? The sounds are limited but solid: kick drum, plus two flavours of snare, as well as the combinable presets (which of course tempo-sync to your host DAW). Saturation, compression and bit-crusher controls let you have a bit of extra fun with the tone.

Bass 3 KONTAKT

P2P | 27.12.2018 | 45 MB

Now this little thing is funky! The Hohner Bass 3 was an all-analogue minisynth that produced three preset bass tones: Guitar, String and Tuba. Don’t let the names fool you: this isn’t orchestral, nor is it folky. It’s just raw and wild: a thunky twang gives the Guitar patch its bite, the String setting is all low tone for instant depth, and the Tuba is snarly with a ton of overtones to help it cut through a mix (or to be low-pass filtered to get even more scope). It all came packaged in a little black leatherette suitcase that you could close up to take on the road; and opened, it could be perched atop your Rhodes on stage so you could riff with your right and hold down the bass with your left. It was like opening up a neat little package and finding the Biggest Sound In The World was hiding inside.

VL Calc KONTAKT

P2P | 26.12.2018 | KONTAKT | 76.15 MB

Something that was weirdly great about the 80s was the emergence of “things that are also other things”. For example: pencil erasers that also smell of candy. Or toy cars that are also toy robots. Or school calculators that are also tiny synthesisers. Casio’s VL Tone series of calculators really embodied an oddball notion taken to extremes: once you’ve solved the square on the hypotenuse as being equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of the triangle, why not kick back with some funky toonz? (Luckily there was a headphone jack built in, so that the surprisingly loud two-inch speaker didn’t distract the rest of the class from their studies.) Not only were there six preset sounds to fool around with, you could even – get this – program your own, by inputting laborious strings of numbers with the calculator switched to a special mode. With control over envelope, tone shape, vibrato and so on, you could come up with your own VL Tone patches, in a move which Casio presumably hoped was a kind of gateway drug to their bigger, more professional keyboards.

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.