December 23rd, 2009
Other than not taking the time to see how many people are reading our blog – I’ve been phenomenally busy. As has Dean.
In case you somehow missed it, we’ve released our first sound pack, Bombs and Bits, a nice 10 pack of free hip hop loops, and we put the entire store on sale for the holidays. You’ve got a week left on that.
The Sound Pack concept has gone well enough for us to explore it further – we will be doing a series of Battery/Live kits with sounds originating from different locales across the U.S. First up, Detroit. Dean spent a few days living in a cardboard box in a Detroit alley with an expensive portable recorder. You can hear him fighting off the homeless, and even serving a few people in a full on urban dance off to the death. I’m kidding, he has family there and happened to have his digital recorder with him. Regardless, all the sounds in our upcoming sound pack originate in Detroit. We will be doing the same for Chicago, New York, and possibly L.A. or San Francisco. I could use some sun.
Also in the works is what I’ll call, for lack of a better title, a beat-off. Corey has recorded (played live) 10 separate loop ideas. He will be editing them into functional loops while retaining the live feel. He is then going to hand over the source tracks to Sega, Dean, and myself at which point we will beat off for a few weeks and completely recreate new and hopefully exciting variations of his original loops. With no rules. They will sound nothing like what Corey played and wander far, far away into the lands of IDM, Breakbeat, maybe even a bit of Jungle. So – 10 original live loops with 9 re-sequenced versions of each loop. Plus a ton of individual samples and B3 kits. Looking forward to this.
And lastly, my good friend Matt Cordier and I are going to do some sampling in early Jan. in what looks to be the start of a massive Dark Downtempo release. Dark Downtempo 1 and 2 are easily our best selling individual kits and I think it’d be worth everyone’s time if I did a full release of that nature. So, we’re talking about 40-50 loops and a ton of variations and construction elements. We’ve bought a Placid Audio Copperphone to help make things even more interesting.
That’s all I’ve got, have a wonderful holiday and Thank You for supporting what we’re doing!
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November 5th, 2009
Holidays are a time for giving. Also, we feel like people need to check out our loops/sounds and use them in practical application. So, Dean and I are currently working on a series of Free Hip Hop loops. They will also include some live scratching . . it should all be fun, useful, and of course, free.
We had a brainstorm style meeting last night with the cohorts (Corey and Sega) about what we’ll be doing in 2010. I think we may have cracked the code of live, played beats vs programmed beats. We all love the feel of live playing, but honestly, not many people end up using those kinds of loops. At least not to their advantage. And especially in electronic music. I’ll leave you in in the dark for now on the actual details, but we’ve got an interesting approach on the way.
The other primary idea, well, it involves travel.
Bombs/Bits is underway. We’re going to release it as an enormous Battery kit, forgoing the loops, and see if you guys find that useful. Dean has been a sampling machine thus far and I’m, per usual, dragging my feet just a bit.
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October 23rd, 2009
We’re back to work, at least conceptually, with the next set of loops. This one will be very Battery-centric as the focus is really on something I find lacking with a lot of sound libraries. The big “film” booms, and the little forensic accents. I’ll be running around my studio all weekend with an AEA r84 and an Avedis pre cranked up to 70db. In the meantime, the box.
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October 21st, 2009
The Beatserv Series Two sessions started with Corey McCafferty and I in a loft space in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor area of Chicago. I’ve worked with Corey for a couple years now in Atomica Project. He’s got a real unique approach to playing as well as recording and we thought he’d be perfect to help us record some raw samples.
We used an array of mics – an old Audix D3, a shiny new AEA r84, a matched pair of Peluso ribbons, an Oktava 219 (custom mod by Michael Joly @ Oktavamod.com - and recorded the samples into Nuendo through my Lavry Blue converters and Corey’s reclocked (via the Lavry) MOTU 896mk3.
From there, I handed the raw files over to Dean and Andrew. Everyone used a completely different approach to design their beats. Personally, after trying 1000 other things, I decided to build a custom NI Battery kit to work on my beats. We’d been toying with the idea of adding NI Battery to our formats so it only made sense and proved to be a wise choice. Making beats comes pretty easily to most of us – choosing the right sounds out of literally thousands of samples can be a bit more challenging.
Dean and Andrew used a lot of re-synthesis techniques to enhance their samples. I won’t even pretend to know what Andrew uses but I know Dean prefers to work in Live. Corey and I went the more organic route, though both of us are pretty serious compression geeks. At the end of the day I feel like we all created something unique using the same source material – and that was the goal to begin with.
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