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!

Music Theory & Chords TUTORiAL

P2P | 26 December 2018 | 1.85 GB

for Beatmakers and Producers
This course stresses on the importance of being a beatmaker behind music theory knowledge When you’re a beatmaker, all you want to do is create amazing beats. But in your early years the main thing holding you back is your comprehension of chords, scales, and basic music theory fundamentals. In over my 10 years, I have not only discovered how chords and scales work, but I’ve found a really easy way to explain it, too. Put it this way, on your piano, you have 12 notes available to you, which repeat on each octave, right? Well, just because you have your 12 notes available, doesn’t mean you’re actually allowed to play all of those notes. This is where the key and scale come into play. My promise to you with this course is after watching it, you will gain such a concrete basis for understanding the notes available for you to play, how to count beats, and comprehend the major and minor chords to be creative with.

Dream Guitars 2 KONTAKT

P2P | 27.12.2018 | 659 MB

Dream Guitars 2 is the new library for Kontakt featuring a complete selection of fully playable rhythmic patterns and sequences, with a cinematic and ambient feel, forged from sonic manipulation of Acoustic and Electric guitar sounds. Dream Guitars 2 is an ideal tool for creating athmospheric and evocative rhythmic beds (reversed, lo-fi, ethereal textures, ominous sounding sequences and a lot more) to any style of music, including Film Music, Pop/Rock, Post-Rock, Ambient and Electronica/Hip Hop. With its usable interface and a selected array of controls and effects Dream Guitars 2 allows the customization and creation of an unlimited range of inspiring sounds. Controls include a Luminance control with over 20 impulses and a Rhythmizer for additional modulation.

OrgaTone 601 KONTAKT

P2P | 25.12.2018 | KONTAKT | 277.67 MB

We’ve sampled amazing, expensive, state-of-the-art machines like the Emulator II and the Roland Jupiter 6, but sometimes what a track calls for is something a little more basic, a little more humble in its origins. Think soundtrack to Napoleon Dynamite. Think home keyboard. Think cheese. Think Casiotone. Orgatone 601 is a loving and not at all post-modern-ironic version of the godfather of Casio’s home keyboard range, the Casiotone 601. This was a surprisingly big instrument, with full-sized keys, inbuilt rhythms, and onboard speaker (of course!) and a touch-sensitive nudge-bar that you could use to trigger the rhythm fills. This relied on skin to make it function, and was situated on the left-hand front edge of the keyboard, so if you wanted a fill-in rhythm pattern while playing with both hands you really needed to be wearing shorts and hit it with your knee, but… whatever. It sounded neat, kinda.