Sample libraries worth buying
(file under: more musical notes after 2am)
When not doing “sketches for real instruments”, I usually tend to sample the sounds I use and wouldn’t want to use a preset or a drum loop someone else has made, unless it’s for the comedy effect. Since I can’t play for shit, I consider the sound, the tonality, to be maybe the most important part of my music and thus using mostly someone else’s sounds, out of the box, would be the equivalent of tracing a photo off a magazine, drawing some CMYK lines on it with markers and passing it as “my artwork”. No point in that, not for me at least. To use an example, I couldn’t really be proud of the Zen Bound soundtrack, were I using some kind of a pre-made percussion kit for the hundreds of wood&metal sounds in the background, instead of having spent days and days on recording and processing those and gluing them together. If I can’t be a musician or a landscape painter, at least let me pretend to be an artisan! :P
However, some sounds are simply not practical to record yourself or doing it well turns out to be a horrible job. Like sampling a Hang Drum, one of the sweetest instruments ever, sounding a bit like a balinese gamelan and maybe a metallophone making babies, costing a bit less than a ten grand. Or recording the sounds an army bunker. Hence I’ve been buying Tonehammer sample sets over the last few months and have to admit I’m totally hooked. Their stuff is really deeply sampled, like a hundred of samples for one note/sound and considering that, not expensive at all. Unless you’re one of the people who think that all things should be free and no-one paid for their work, that is.
Today, well, this night, like 20 minutes ago, I got their latest epic sample set, Rust 2. It’s funcredible, so many huge booms and scrapey sounds just begging to be bent out of shape and used, here’s a quick example of them without almost any bending going on, just me bashing some keys:
And as a bonus, here’s some kind of a Zen Bound song (probably a non-game version) with some Complementary Hang Drum on it so you’ll know how it sounds. I suppose I have to use the Hang set if we ever get around to making ZB2, Walrus Bound or whatever. This is just to give you a feel of the sound of the thing, hitting the keys in my barbaric non-musician way:
(Even though TH also carries their own equally good version of the theme, the Hang Drum sound set I’ve got is from Sonic Couture, another purveyor of classy sounds.)
I promise to tell you a more interesting bedtime story the next time, ok? Now curl up and sleep tight.
t.. / polyfonken / ghost monkey