Inwhich our hero flash their wares..

This time I’ve got something deliciously alien for you, quite literally.

Venera14 Drum Machine is a free DecentSampler-instrument made from audio recordings captured by the Soviet space-probe from which it takes its name.

Venera 14, one of many stubborn attempts by the Soviets to tame the wrothful spirit of Venus, managed to grab a few minutes of audio before it was ultimately overwhelmed by the hellacious passion of our temperamental sister-planet.

The resulting audio mostly consist of sinister winds and the sound of a drill boring down into the surface. But there’s also a handful of transients, particularly the sound of the lens-cap of the probe-camera popping off and then landing on the ground.

So I grabbed the strongest of those transients, which already had the rough likeness of a kick and a snare, and then applied a little creative filtering, surgical eq, and a touch of whichcraft, to process them into something more distinctly drum-sounding.

The result is a kick, a snare and a tom (that’s what I’m calling it anyway), and in addition to that I also composited together a kind of hi-hat by gating the Venusian winds and blending that with two aggressively high-passed transients.

There’s no round robins for this one, partly because there was not enough source material for multiple versions of the same sounds, but also because I was deliberately going for that static copy-pasted vibe of old school drum samples.

But I did add three additional layers from those same sounds, one distorted, one with tons of crappy tape processing, and one with a bit of slosh. All of which can be conveniently blended to taste in DecentSampler..

Needless to say, this is not a substitute for your rock-drums, but instead offers a deliberately monotonous and static industrial vibe, reminiscent of 1980’s drum machines.

Its purposefully inhuman and mechanical, but still gently sprinkled with a subtle suggestion of realism, courtesy of the rough organic source.

The coarse and crusty nature of these sounds lends itself well to dungeon synth, lofi beats, dark wave, grungy underscoring, sound design, or as subtle layers to blend with real drums for some robotic spice.

As always, feel free to pinch the samples and repurpose them however you want. Let me know if you turn them into something cool!

If you don't have DecentSampler, you can grab a copy over here, It's free and available for Linux/Win/Mac. Or you can just lift the wav's from the samples folder and use them in whatever sampler you prefer.

In celebration of Dave Hilowitz releasing a Linux-hack for his excellent DecentSampler, I decided to make a few instruments for it, and rather than just do my usual organic pads and weirdo-slosh, I thought that I might have a go at making a sampled drumkit.

Partly as a sort of challenge, to see if I could actually muster up the patience needed for baking a drumkit, especially with a text-only-editor – with all the velocity-layers and round robins that’s required for sampled drums not to sound like an 80’s drum-machine.

But also because it would be nice with a lightweight drumkit that can run natively in Linux without wine, and without sounding like absolute rubbish. The result is a sketch-kit that sound like some sort of hybrid between a drum-machine and a live kit. I probably wouldn’t put it on my record, but it’s a CPU-friendly hardrock-kit that’ll get the job done for sketching and demoing.

These samples were not purpose-tracked for a sample-instrument, and are a bit of a mix-and-match job. The shells were recorded about three years ago, as part of the recording-session for an EP I mixed and collaborated on. They consist of Isolated one-shot samples that was intended as a mix-resource, as well as selected hits dissected from the actual drum-takes.

The hats and cymbals were recorded a couple of weeks ago by my mate in her bonk-shed for an other project. I recorded some additional side-sticks and count-ins at my HQ, and then tried to make it all somewhat coherent with EQ-matching and whichcraft, blending the “room-ambiance” from the undisclosed Lothian barn where we tracked the original drums with the rest of the samples.

The Kit was an old Gretch (no relation), with a Ludwig Supraphonic snare, (I believe..). We processed it quite heavily on the way in, as well as employing the auld black album room-mics-rerouting trick in order to bake the signal even further.

For a silly lab project, it turned out alright I though, despite the limited number of velocity layers and round robins. It definitely left me with a taste for more, and it would be cool to do a proper purpose-recorded and natural-sounding drum library one of these days. I’d love to sample a vintage Slingerland-kit or a Ludwig Club Date if anyone feels like collaborating ;- ).

As always, feel free to pinch the samples and repurpose them however you want. Let me know if you turn them into something cool!

This one is a simple soundset for U-he's mono synth Repro-1.

I made these Repro-1 patches a while back, partly in order to learn Repro, and partly to create some building blocks for an electronic concept album/project/thing.

I still have not written a note for the electronica thing, but at least a few patches came out of it, so I guess that’s something..

Sharing these in case someone else might find them useful.

If you don’t have Repro, You can get the yourself a copy over at U-he’s place. Most of their stuff can be demoed for free. Or you can just hit these download links directly→ Linux, Windoze, Mac

If you'r just starting out with Repro, you might wanna check out Dan Worrall’s Repro Introduction videos here.