ROLAND TR-909 BASS DRUM RECORDED THROUGH 13 DISTORTION UNITS from thegearfiend.com

This is something yummy to repost: the TR-909 bassdrum sampled through some distortion units:

I recorded a TR-909 Bass Drum through the following distortion units to compare and contrast the sounds.

1) Dunlop Fuzz Face
2) Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff with Top Boost
3) Maxon OD-9
4) Boss OS-2
5) Boss DS-1
6) Boss DS-2
7) Pro Co RAT
8) Tech 21 VT Bass
9) MXR Bass D.I. +
10) Electro-Harmonix English Muff'n
11) Moog Moogerfooger Lowpass Filter
12) Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff Pi
13) Elektron SidStation

I like  this way of sampling because it involves both the Roland TR-909 and some BOSS pedals although I wish the guy had sampled it through 13 distortion units IN A ROW!! :)
Besides this, my favorite distortion comes from the Elektron SidStation: I love the SID background noise in action.

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TR-505 thorough BOSS METAL ZONE samples

I'm glad finally someone replied to my call for material for the blog
Today Dj Quartzlocker sent me these samples he made running a Roland TR-505 thorough a BOSS METAL ZONE pedal

The MT-2 Metal Zone™ is one of BOSS' most popular pedals. This stompbox provides some of the most over-the-top, insane distortion tones in the world—with huge mids and lows and an ultra-saturated sound. 

The 505 works well with a computer and sequencer or as a stand alone drum machine. It is extremely basic and unexciting but does make a good starter or play-along drum machine. Vince Clarke and Aphex Twin has used the 505.

I'm happy of this combo because I used to own both devices but not simultanously so I never had the chance to make any samplekit with them. This also confirms what I said about pedals in the past.

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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 Delay units used to make stereo a Spring Reverb

I'm the lucky owner of a vintage Eagle Products Spring Reverb. It must be quite a rare device as Google knows nothing about it. Its sound is very typical but the possible settings are nearly zero.



Another weakness is that it's mono and since reverbs are used to widen the stereo image this makes it unusable to mix a song.

In my rack two Digital Delays that I had for free from friends were collecting dust: a Roland SDE-1000 and a Roland GP-8. Same brand, so they should sound similar...this is perfect for what I had in mind...




Phasers, Flangers, Reverbs, Echoes are always delays with different settings. In fact with about 20ms of delay and a bit of feedback a delay becomes a sort of reverb. With this in mind I ran a splitted cable out of the spring reverb so to feed the same mono signal into the two delay units configured as reverbs but with slightly different delay times. The resulting signals going back to the mixer were pan-potted to about 90%. Here I should have worried a little about phase correlation problems when processing low frequency material but I just didn't mind since I always center anything below 150hz when finalizing for vinyl.

Finally, I shaped the L+R return with a little EQ and the result is a lovely stereo effect!


Ingredients:

• Eagle Products Vintage Analog Spring Reverb


• Roland SDE-1000 Digital Delay


• Roland GP-8 Guitar Effect Processor

Space Echo VST

I always loved Tape Delays, from the time one has been used in the recording of my first record I was fascinated by the concept behind them and by the sound they produced.

I say "produced", because a thirty-years-old magnetic tape is not and effect anymore: it's a sound generator - triggered by an external signal.

Recently I had the chance to try this nice VST plug-in that emulates the mighty Roland RE-201:



I must admit the sound is very convincing for a plug-in. The reverberation is smooth and the delay flows. Good. The point is, I can't see any option to dirty up the sound. As usual, modern plugins emulate the machine as it was engineered originally but (of course) they can't simulate ALL the applications that the analog version may have, never ever the most crazy and unpredictable. They simulate the original but don't stimulate as the original.

I owned a real Space Echo for a while and I never used it as a delay or reverb. It's a crazy effect, it makes anything fed sound fatter and fedback. And yes...it sounds Industrial!

And again the score is: Digital 1 - Analog 2

I'm not saying you should get a real Space Echo...well...yes I'm saying that! And make sure the tape is not new :)