Samples of the week: Queen Drums, Experimental bass, summer sales
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Our Samples of the week feature is here with Queen Drums, two very interesting bass libraries from Soundiron and Impact Soundworks, and three major summer offers by Ghosthack, Ugritone, and Sonokinetic. Let’s dig in…
Vintage Drum Samples – Queen Drums for Kontakt
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Vintage Drum Samples introduced Queen Drums for Kontakt, a drum sample library inspired by the sound of Queen drumming legend Roger Taylor. Its creators gave their best shot at puling off the characteristic Ludwig sound with era-specific instruments, mics, and signal chains. We don’t get any more specifics, but the sounds hit good and the functionality look promising.
Queen Drums is available for Kontakt 5.4.3 or later with up to 12 round robins and articulations, along with wav files for use outside Kontakt. Queen Drums is priced just USD 10.
Soundiron – The New Twine Bass (Experimental Low String samples)
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Twine Bass is comprised of a special pair of string instruments: a modified cello and a traditional Kenyan fretless Bolon. The cello is strung with rough hemp twine in various tunings and played as a stand-up bass. The resulting sounds are ‘deeply sonorous, with a woody and soft quality’ which sounds like a great backdrop to an erotic scene. Not so much for the Bolon, whose neck is made of a cow’s horn, and the gourd body has a goat-skin resonating head that the strings pass directly through. That’s just metal!
Soundiron went deep into it by sampling the strings with 10x round-robin and up to 14 velocity layers. They also recorded extra sounds, such as legato slides, string mutes, tuning peg pluck/twists, finger taps, finger brushes, and other percussive effects on the instrument’s body. So plenty of odd and unexpected variety to choose from!
The Kontakt library also contains atmospheric sounds, such as ambient pads, drones, and soundscapes. The swell, attack, release, offset, vibrato, filter, pitch (coarse & fine), articulation switching, cross-fading, and layering controls can be automated, among others. Further 20 unique FX presets are included for additional creative options. Also present is an adaptable LFO system, 12 kinds of filters with assignable modulation targets, a customizable arpeggiator with a key and scale lock system, and more. A modular FX rack panel with 18 different DSP effect modules is also available, with 10 slots to stack phaser, flanger, delay, distortion, amp and cab simulators, compressors, EQ, rotator, and other built-in effects. The Reverb module includes 99 rooms, halls, chambers, and outdoor environments alongside 40 custom FX impulses.
Twine Bass works in the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.5+. The free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in limited “demo mode”. However, the samples are unlocked so you can use them in external audio software. The price is USD 25, down from USD 39.
Impact Soundworks Shreddage 3 Fretless virtual bass
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Impact Soundworks promises the perfect “mwah” fretless bass sound, which is alluring! The instrument is recorded via three channels: DI and a pair of mics on a cab. You can play smooth fretless lines and leads from the comfort of your MIDI controller, a far cry from taming an actual fretless.
More advanced features include optional lookahead which analyzes notes to calculate the most realistic fingering and voicing, deep articulation conrols, and a console FX rack with over 30 studio effects. All essential bass articulations are covered among the 20,000+ samples, including sustains, mutes, staccatos, harmonics, hammer-on / pull-off, slides, and release noises.
Each of the five strings is sampled from open up to the highest fret with up to 4x down/4x up strokes per note, 3 dynamic layers, and 5 palm mute layers. The instrument includes 36 production-ready tone presets. It also runs in the free Kontakt Player 6.7+. The price is USD 109, down from USD 129 during the introductory period.
Ugritone Summer of Doom
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Metal drum kit sampling artisans Ugritone take up to 66.6% off their Modern Doom Drums & Vintage Doom Drums sample instruments, and the Droom Metal Anthology & Doom Metal Essentials MIDI packs. The offer is valid until July 31, 2022.
Ghosthack Summer Sale with 6 new sample packs
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Ghosthack announced a Summer Sale where it offers discounts on all its sample packs and synth presets for a limited time. The sale also includes 6 newly released sound packs: Deathstep Essentials, Cinematic Essentials – Braams, Cinematic Essentials – Risers, Old School Hip Hop: Authentic vibes, Keys & Strings Volume 2, and Ambient Underscore Volume 2. Moreover, all orders over EUR 50 get an additional 15% discount at checkout during the promotion!
Sonokinetic 80 Retro Symphonics
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80 Retro Symphonics goes after the incessant action feeling of classic 1980s television and movie scores. This means swirling strings, dramatic woodwinds, punchy brass, and a whole lot of analog and FM synths. The 13GB of sample content include 3 recorded orchestral sections & Retrofier synth layer, 4 recorded microphone positions (close, decca tree, wide, balcony far), individual phrase controls (volume, pan, tempo sync double / half / ITM, modwheel on / off, phrase link, retrofier synth layer level), and Randomization among other features. The library is on sale for an introductory price of EUR 190.90 (down from EUR 249.90) until August 4, 2022.
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