A huge thank you to everyone who purchased DDT3!! Since its release, we’ve gone into sort of a hibernation – but we have many projects underway behind the scenes. I’m terribly busy mixing records, Dean is terribly busy moving and making records. In no particular order, our bullet points of interest:

Vintage – We got a ton of great vintage samples from our good friend Matt Walker (the drummer for Billy Corgan, Morrisey, etc.) that we’ll be releasing in some form or another. Dean, being the youngster around here, is also working on some re-interpretations of classic drum machines for potentially our first Livepack release.

(h)IDM – Matt Cordier and I are laying the plans for a more electronic than usual series called Hostile Intelligent Dance Music. Sort of hard to describe. It will start very organic, but not stay that way. Our most electronic based release.

Series 3 – Somewhere on our list of things to do is another classic Series pack, though we haven’t really had much time to discuss the details.

Mattress Factory – Also this fall, I plan to go see my good friend Martin Atkins (Ministry, Pigface, PIL, etc.)  and raid his extensive percussion setup.

Wow, that’s quite a bit. Matt and I are also going to be getting a space together @ the Music Garage here in Chicago which will allow us the luxury of really focusing on our sampling. That’s it, stay tuned for much, much more.

Dark Downtempo has become, in our limited time as a company, the flagship product of beatserv. It’s the most frequently downloaded loop pack, and frankly, the most fun for me to make. Since I spend all of my creative time in a downtempo band, you could say it’s in my wheelhouse. You can find small DDT packs in both Series One and Series Two but this time I set out to do a more extensive pack. I spent a few hours sampling with my friend Matt Cordier before taking the 100′s of samples back to my studio to begin working on the loops. Instead of using a multiple mic technique, this time we just used an AEA r84 ribbon and a Placid Audio Copperphone. Both outstanding microphones with a somewhat vintage sound. The r84 is intensely intimate and that was what we were going for. Matt is really creative with his playing and we ended up using a multitude of ways to strike the drums, making for a whole lot of variety in using just a couple different kick and snare drums.

Long story short here – I’ve put together 30 very distinct loops for DDT3. Each one of them are like my kids, I’d be happy to use them as a producer, as an artist. Very proud of this release! In addition, there is an outstanding Battery kit included this time around, with a ton of the original, unprocessed samples. Go have yourself a listen to the demos.

With Clash released to the masses, we’ve begun exploring and working on ideas for new beats. We have a slew of old school electronic sounds (think Linn drums, etc), courtesy of Matt Walker, and plan on skimming past the 909s to get creative with the more esoteric samples. Wade has been working with Matt Cordier on a large-scale Dark Downtempo pack to cap off the Dark Downtempo trilogy, and I’ve got a similar rock project in mind.

We’re also tossing around some ideas for new freebies. Perhaps a conceptual treat for the IDM kids, like life-themed sounds: a series of plant, animal, bacteria, fungi-based hits and loops. Could be totally bizarre, could be bumpin; we’ll see…

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!

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.

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.

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.