Description
Two weeks ago, I flew to Berlin to attend the annual Superbooth synthesizer festival. I spent a lovely three days walking around the premises, trying out synthesizers, talking to old friends, and making many new ones. While I was there, I had my trusty Zoom recorder with me and recorded quite a lot, though not very systematically: occasionally I would get it out, plug it into whatever synth I happened to be messing with, and record a few notes.
This sample library is a grab bag of all those stray notes. Where possible, I’ve labeled each patch with the instrument used to produce it, but it should be noted that almost none of the presets are actually representative of the instruments: I just plugged my recorder in, and whatever sound came out is what got captured.
Each preset consists of exactly one sample. I did my best to tune the samples so that they match the pitches we’d expect on a piano keyboard, but they are nonetheless single pitches stretched across its full range. Loop points are also very quick and dirty — there may be glitches and pops, and that will just have to be part of the charm of this particular set.
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s inside:
Verbos Stacked Saw: Verbos is a Berlin-based company that specializes in Buchla-style, West Coast synthesis. The unit sampled here, the Sawtooth Stack, is an attractive Eurorack module containing five oscillators. I spent a long time tweaking its controls to produce different timbres, but only recorded a few seconds of audio — so that’s what we’ve got here.
Rumble of Ancient Times: This tiny machine is truly unique. The “ancient times” in its name refers to the 80s; it seeks to recreate the messy, harsh sounds of early PC speaker audio. The sounds I produced on it are quite abrasive. My idea was that these recordings could be tamed with a low-pass filter. As with all the samples in this set, only one sample was recorded per patch — and since many of these have chaotic rhythmic patterns embedded in them, those rhythms will play back at different speeds depending on which note you hit.
Me Singing into a Random Eurorack Module: I wish I had written down more about this one. I was walking around with Hainbach when we stopped at a booth that had a nice Eurorack setup with a microphone. As Hainbach spoke with the person running the booth, I sang a few notes into their mic. I recorded the output, and that is what you’re hearing in this patch.
SynthUX Spotykach: This is a charming and very fun little device; I’ll probably end up doing a full video on it in a couple of months. Essentially, it’s an experimental looping workstation. You plug in a microphone or an instrument, and then you can manipulate the audio in a whole host of ways: looping, slicing, granular processing, and more. Here, I recorded myself singing a steady “Ah” note and turned it into a granular preset. The result sounds a bit like a 90s-era choir patch.
Clank Uranograph: I spent a solid twenty minutes with this beautiful device without ever really understanding what I was doing. The manufacturer describes it as “a complete, self-contained world designed for live experimental performance, where every gesture, touch, and modulation is sculpted in real time.” I really enjoyed playing with it and was pleasantly surprised by how cinematic many of the sounds it produced were.
Landscape Moon: The Moon is a drum synthesizer that uses passive power to produce its sound. I played with it for quite a while but didn’t produce much that could be turned into a melodic sample. Listening back to my recordings, though, I noticed one glitchy sound I really liked, and that’s what I’ve focused on here. I’ve also made a separate patch containing just the tail end of that sound. I had to run it through a time-stretcher to make it long enough in the high registers, so you may notice some odd artifacts.
Oberheim Matrix 12: The Matrix 12 is a legendary analog synthesizer from the mid-80s. There was one on display in the lobby at FEZ-Berlin, so I did a quick recording of whatever preset they had loaded. Unlike the rest of the patches here, this one is a true multi-sample: I captured every six semitones.
Phew! I think that’s it. I hope you enjoy these sounds!
– Dave
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