Samples of the week: Lores, Soul Drums, Winds Boutique and more
Samples? Here we go with this week’s crop of sample packs and sample-based instruments. What do we fancy? Lores by Native Instruments is a very intriguing Kontakt instrument for film (and other) composers. Soul Drums is another take on virtual drums by developer UVI, focused on vintage-sounding kits from the 60s and 70s. Rast Sound Winds Boutique mixes traditional and exotic wind instruments with synthetic sounds in creative ways. As always, there are also a bunch of free samples to download. Have fun and see you next week!
Native Instruments Lores (Kontakt)
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Film and TV composer Clinton Shorter – best known for his work on District 9 – is the inspiration and consultant behind this new Kontakt instrument. Lores combines traditional instruments with rather unusual sounds. For example, blending a Mongolian fiddle with a woodwind ensemble and drenching the result with effects. There are 16 instruments and over 300 articulations to tinker with. You can read more about the very interesting instrument here.
Lores runs inside the free Kontakt Player or the full version of Kontakt 6.7+. 373 presets are included and the library sizes up to a mammoth 72.3 GB. The price is EUR 199.
UVI Soul Drums (standalone, plug-in)
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Drumming with a vintage twist – that’s what UVI’s Soul Drums are all about. The sound is inspired by the 60’s and 70’s but with the benefits of modern recording equipment and production techniques. That’s a nice of way of mixing the old with the new.
The kit sounds can be shaped via 14 microphone positions and various settings for the individual drums. You can even adjust mic bleed along with additional extras like send effects, a master effects rack, multi-outs and mapping presets for most electronic drum sets. You also get multiple play modes with up to nine velocity levels and six round robin layers.
All in all, Soul Drums contains over 150,000 samples plus 1281 playable patterns and 341 presets with a total library size of 12.66 GB. It works either standalone or as a plug-in under macOS and Windows in 64-bit AAX, AU and VST3 formats. A free iLok account is needed for licensing. The introductory price is EUR 99, down from EUR 149.
Rast Sound Winds Boutique (Kontakt & WAV samples)
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Winds Boutique is about combining various wind instruments with synthetic sounds. The arsenal includes clarinet, bassoon, oboe, flute, duduk, shakuhachi, and bamboo flutes among other blow-able objects. All instruments were recorded with different articulations and mixed with analogue synths. The acoustic and analog are split into layers with the ability to shape the mix using a pitch LFO and settings for dynamics and release. You can also play the layers in keyboard split mode. The output is fed into an effects section that adds saturation, reverb and compression. Additional parameters include stereo width and color.
A full version of Kontakt (5.8 or newer) is required to run the instrument. Alternatively, you have some 980 WAV files at your disposal. An introductory offer of EUR 47 is available until May 2, 2022. The regular price is EUR 79.
Free samples
The sample pack Modern Guitar Loops Vol. 1 by Monosounds is actually available for a fee, but is currently free for a short time. It contains guitar loops from different genres with melodies inspired by Nirvana, Machine Gun Kelly, 24kGoldn, and Trippie Redd. There are full stems for each melody. A total of 96 melodies are included in the sample collection. All of this normally costs USD 40, but Monosounds is giving away the whole thing as we speak.
Recently, a reader spotlighted the free sample packs from Trust in Wax. There’s a whole range of different packages that come primarily from the Münster Beatnetz and their project Sample Roulette. They have titles like Baronski Breaks Vol.1, Atwashere, Soundclown or Akimov’s Sample Roulette. You an get everything for nothing or make a voluntary donation.
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