Alesis SR-16 Drummachine

I got an Alesis SR-16, cheaply, from E-bay. Something that makes me totally happy is that hitting the pads outputs distorted sounds. Lucky me, I got a self-circuit bending unit for the price of a faulty one!! This reminds me of a TR-909 I owned back in the nineties which had the hi-tom section broken and would output just a white noise, obeying to MIDI note-ons and offs... inspiring!



During my early years of music making I started to collaborate with an industrial/noise band called "Gennaio". They were four guitarists and an Alesis SR-16 as a drummer and my role should have been to replace the drummachine playing live with my Amiga computer.

The project never went too far but I had the chance to hear the SR-16 cold and reverberated sound in action and it sounded deeply industrial. This sentence from vintagesynth.com just confirms it:

No doubt the SR-16 is a powerful drum machine, but ultimately it also sounds like a drum machine. [...] But all those bumper stickers about drum machines having no soul just might be directed at the SR-16.

After a full day of use I compiled a list of useful instruments:

"Rock 1" Good toms
"Rock 2" Dirty kick
"Rock 3" Mid tom very good
"Rock 4" Low tom very good
"Rock 5" Nice reverb kick
"Rock 6" Good toms
"Rock 7" Cool crash
"Hard Rock 1" Nothing interesting
"Hard Rock 2" Kick and crash
"Hard Rock 3" Great snare!
"R&B 1" Forget it :)
"R&B 2" YAhn!
"R&B 3" Nice kick and snare!
"Funk 1" Crash ok
"Funk 2" Kick and rimshot
"Blues 1" All nice sounds
"Blues 2" Sparkling crash
"Rap 1" 808esque kick, tom 1 and 2 are some good noises
"Rap 2" Kick and snare
"Rap 3" kick ok, metallic snare, tom 3 very deep and dirty
"Techno 1" Besides the name, only a good snare here
"Techno 2" Good kick and great metallic snare!
"Techno 3" Tom 3 sounds powerful
"Reggae 1" ehm...
"Reggae 2" uhm...
"Jazz Rock 1" Snare ok but claps are better
"Jazz Rock 2" Tom and crash but like other banks basically
"Fusion 1" Good dry kick
"Fusion 2" Good toms
"New Age 1" Cutting open hat and good snare
"New Age 2" Kick and snare but like others
"Country 1" Leave it
"Country 2" Leave it
"Country 3" Leave...
"Country Rock" The sounds tends to repeat...
"Rockabilly" Good snare with reverb
"Jazz 1" Quiet stuff
"Jazz 2" You won't buy a unit for this
"Dixie" Dirty kick
"Polka" Quite useless
"Latin 1" Dry kick
"Latin 2" Repeated sounds
"Latin 3" Good Tom 1
"Latin 4" Nahh
"Latin 5" Claps have a strange snare, not bad
"Ballad 1" Snare with long reverb!
"Ballad 2" Again Claps have a disorted percussion
"Ballad 3" Another long snare
"Ballad 4" More long snare
"Ballad 5" Even longer snare and reverb on toms

With this unit I am definitely going to make some sample kits like:

• Alesis sampled into Amiga @ 8-BIT


• Alesis sampled thru BOSS Overdrive


• Alesis sampled thru Black Audio Destructor

Anyone interested in some fresh Industrial percussions should stay tuned...

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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Barber Pole Flanger VST

Here's another child of the "simple GUI but great sound" family of plug-ins:

The sweep of the flanged sound seems to move in only one direction (“up” or “down”) infinitely, instead of sweeping back-and-forth.

It features a simple implementation of the Barber Pole Flanging but it's best feature is when used with all the knobs set to maximum levels. With such a configuration it acts as a "re-synthesizer" giving a typical metallic Vocoder timbre to any sound filtered.

• 4 different algorithms.


• Up to 8 stages for smooth and blurry flanging.


• Independent control of depth and modulation speed.


• Manual included.


• Open Source.

Highly recommended!

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Metallic noises with AKAI S900

Hot nights have become cold and now are slowly fading to freezing. I'm not used to the new season yet so it's too early to compose music. Sampling safaris are the right activity. Like an ant at the beginning of the autumn I am storing new samples to be used during the winter...

Today I spent a nice evening in front of my AKAI S900, a sampler widely known and appreciated for its metallic timbre, dumping via MIDI a few metallic sounds.




Playing them back at different pitches with weird looping points creates some new raw materials.

A good denoising stage was required to remove the sampler background noise and to obtain some usable audio textures that I am going to share.

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Thrummaschine distortion VST

Finally a good distortion plug-in, capable of band separated modulations:



The signal is splitted in 3 adjustable bands and can be distorted quite strongly. Indeed, every band filter can be modulated with an LFO. Band can be panned freely so to transform any MONO sound in STEREO.

- 3 user-defined bands for bass, mid and high freqencies, with overlap if required
- 3 filters with tempo-sync LFO, for each freq band
- overdrive, distortion and bitcrush effects
- send level for each band to each effect
- pan and volume for each band

I got some very nice results by layering two or more instances of the plug-in in the same channel, that way the amount of controls and automation is widened.

More informations and DOWNLOAD

Building an Analog drum module

I just received everything I need to build my own Analog Drum Module:



Someone managed to convince me that by doing this I will be a even cooler musician, so here I am...digging on resistors, diodes, wires and meaningless boards!



The module is a DS7 Drum Synce (DC860)and the smaller one is a simple Gate To Trigger Converter.

The DS7 Drum Synce (DC860) is a little analog percussion synthesizer from the 80's made by CORON. This drumsynth was dedicaced to drummers : the DS7 was fixed on the border of a drum to be played/triggered by hitting the drum.

The DS7 contain a VCO +VCA chain. The VCO is modulated by a cheesy LFO and a simple decay envelope trigged by the piezzo cell pulse. The cell work as a pressure/hit sensor. It can be replaced by a jack to be used with any kind of trigg pulses or even gates. In this case the "decay" pot become a "Release" pot ... The VCA is directly controled by the envelope. The LFO can drive the VCO from slow modulation to hi-speed to produce FM like sounds.

I needed some new analog raw meat for the distortion chain... let's see how long it takes to build it :)

FerricTDS - Tape Dynamics Simulator VST

I had this FerricTDS VST .DLL sleeping in my plugins folder for a few months now. I did think it was good for whole mixes and never thought it could have any employment in industrial music.

Inspired by the smooth dynamic shaping capabilities of some high-end reel-to-reel tape recorders, this plug-in simulates three of the most distinctive and much appreciated sonic effects generated by these devices:

DYNAMICS
- gently shaping the overall dynamic response
SATURATION
- adding extra harmonic-related content
LIMITING
- controlling peak performance

But a few days ago I accidently watched a presentation video on YouTube and realized it was sounding incredibly good on snare drums:

So I spent the last weekend testing it on them and I was right: the correct sampled snare (mostly from '80 drum machines) processed with the right reverb and fed into this plug-in will produce the classic industrial snare, also the loudest ones from modern EBM.

I am going to test the plug-in on whole mix anyway, as it is said to work very well on enhancing loudness.


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