Monthly Archives: November 2010

The Tunnel Sample Pack

I recorded a bunch of samples in a stone tunnel on Mt. Royal here in Montreal a while back – stomps, tin cans, bottles, plastic containers, sticks and stones and etc. clanking and knocking around. Here are some of them cut up into individual hits for your percussioneering pleasure.

And here’s a beat I made with them, loaded into a new version of ParamDrum.

The new version will be available this week as soon as I make a few more demo presets. Notable additions are: a sub bass control to add some extra oomph to your bass samples, and decay and sample-start controls.

UPDATE: daaaamn, I have to stop working in headphones. The bass ain’t what I thought. I have to redo this with a better kick that kicks.

Reaktor Spiral opened in raw mode in Audacity

Most binary file types just give you white noise if you try the old “open them in an audio editor” trick to make samples for Ryoji Ikeda or Alva Noto type tracks. However I’ve discovered that Reaktor ensembles lend themselves particulary well to this misuse and often sound extremely varied and unpredictable. Probably has something to do with the variety of embedded information – primary level structures, core level structures, samples, bitmaps and who knows what else.

UPDATE: some more details on opening binaries in AudacityFIRST, TURN DOWN THE VOLUME. Raw binary files like this can be as grating and ear damaging as anything Merzbow ever came up with. Careful with your ears and equipment.

in the main Audacity menu, go to file -> import -> raw data, browse to your file, and open it. You will get a dialog asking for the bit depth, “endianness”, and number of channels. Experiment with different options but 16 bit stereo is a good start.