fine alien part iii: samplephonics project

so recently I approached Samplephonics about if theyd take a sample pack from me which I described as stylistically akin to synthwave, idm, and future funk, a day later I got sent back this

Code:

Hey Mark, sounds cool! Please send over some of your work to [email] and we'll forward on to the production team to take a listen

(I'm not sure why they referred to me as Mark, I guess he was introducing himself haha) so basically I'm starting another sample pack.
I probably should've made it before asking about the ifs and such but I'm not going to dwell on it.
I'm expecting these dudes to be a bit more cooperative than loopmasters which haha, I sent them my first sample pack and they didn't even write back. Given that was a shitty ass samplepack on retrospect but damn could'a at least said "this shit sucks". Plus these dudes (looking at a few of the sample packs they usually push and a few of them by them I have in my workstation) seem to be like, suckers for weird genres. (Which I am too haha)

Any way, going to be documenting the effort here like last time.

Right now I'm thinking, structurally something to the tune of
(sound type followed by quantity)
Loops
Arps 60
Atmosphere 12
Music/Synth 60
Bass 60
Drum Loops
 2 bars 30
 4 bars 30
 FX'd Loops 60
Grooves 30 (debating on this one)
One Shots
Drum Hits
 Kick 66
 Snare 33 (depending on how better I get at making good snares)
 Claps 33
 Hats and Cymbals 66
 Perc 66
FX
 Rise 12
 Impact 12
 Glitch 24
Synth Multis
   Synth 12
   Bass Synth 12
   Organ 12

subject to change but this is the framework I'll be working in, at least initially

As for plans of production, I do intend to use my drum synth for a good bit of the drum sounds, which I will be starting with first. If I do drum sounds first, then I can do drum loops afterwards, and the drum loops will make the music parts easier, providing a rhythmic foundation and such. I do intend to have jam sessions to contribute to the content of this project so it doesn't get too dull in the production process, which eventually leads to like, duller sounds longer down ig.

For most of the general synth and music sound design I'm gonna have it based on like, virtual analog stuff with oldschool mixing and processing techniques to bring out the, I guess you'd call it "New Old"/vice versa vibe.
I'm going to be using a variety of scales for the music portions but I primarily want to use A Minor, C major/minor, G major, and some funky ass dorian shit.

I'll start experimenting and shit today but I don't think I'll be able to get too into it until tomorrow.

day 1

Made 63 individual drum hits/2 full drum kits (minus claps cause I usually get to those later and the claps won't be categorized into kits like the rest of the hits)
There is an off balance 'cause in the first kit there's like 10 percs and in the second there's 4
Made 5 drum loops out of them in according to their kits, 4 for the first kit and 1 for the second (gonna make 3 more tomorrow).
Two kits are labeled DSV and Grape
DSV standing for Drum Synth Vanilla, the presets I made for my drum synth a while back (though there was a good bit of laborious tweaking to them), and Grape idfk it just started when I made this really bouncy ass kick. The Grape kit was made through 2 or 3 synths collectively each hit having a clone of the used synth for like a dual stereo-ish effect and the opportunity to minorly tweak the second, reduce the volume, and make it sound like oldschool slightly detuned -- furthermore the grape kit was processed to make it sound like its being played through tape but that's probably gonna become a normal routing thing down the line of this project.

Looking back through my first sample pack there are a few goodies here and there, might salvage a few of the drum hits from there, but it depends.
I won't get much done today cause I got an appointment in birmingham to address my crippling illnesses and if im dying and what have you, but I'll try to squeeze some stuff in this morning and tonight.

reconsidering the amount of drum hits to do. I think 33 or so for each section should be enough, upon retrospect my first sample pack (66 drum hits for each) was a bit gratuitous and that was intentional -- it was also why i could design drum sounds for like a fuckin month or so cause the workload made me sick and near the end they started sounding shitty. so i'll keep this humble.

in fact, at this rate I'm almost done with the individual hits.

ps: if samplephonics rejects me I do have a fallback plan. if they don't, I have another job! :]

honestly i have no idea if im legit gonna get paid for these though lol

Alright so there currently stands 4 basic drum kits (one missing perc sounds but ill work on that tomorrow or so)
"basic drum kit" consisting of 4 hits each for; kick, snare, closed hat, open hat. percs are a lot less linear but minimum of four
before I left this morning I made the Weener kit, using Tremor, which is the drum synth I used for the bulk of the drum sounds on the last sample pack project. The latest one, PTDS (Prototype Drum Synth) is made from, as the name implies, the first stable build of my drum synth. I've put out some percs from it too but theres a lot more to be put out from it. (On retrospect I do like the background I had for it much better than the newest one, and even though technically inferior, the limitations inspired me to pull off some crazy shit with that 808 osc, thus inspiring the broken 808 oscs for the later build)

That's 4 Kits, 4 sounds for each category per kit, ex 4 kits = 16 hits per basic category.
16 Kicks, Closed and Open hats, and Snares. 19 Perc hits.
In total as of now, 83 individual analog drum sounds.

Roughly 4 more drum kits to go. but next time I pick this up (hopefully tomorrow given the amount of make up work I have isnt absurd), I'll be focusing more on making loops out of the kits right now. I might even go ahead and get started on the synth hits afterwards as well, as hearing filtered white noise can get grating.

alright so idk where i left off but i made the loops for all the kits without loops
the loops for the weener kit turned out surprisingly good and crunkish, the ptds ones not so much.. like, 50/50 i guess haha
started on another drumkit, made all the snares (which I just layered some samples from drum machines and modded up the sound to high hell) and like, a kick or two idk but by then I had to let up lol.

this is all so technical damn but i kinda understand from what i got out of my midi class

thats good, youre learnin shit from it then

It's over now it ended last semester

well who's fault is that

well I can't really take it again and if I advance I have to know how to play an instrument which I don't

but this thread isnt about me lol

lol i just say that shit to everybody

about to get started finishing that kit, and most likely another one afterwards.
since i started it by stacking oldschool drum machine snare samples and sample manipulation n whathaveyou im gonna do it with the rest of the kit to keep up the same vibe n shit

alright so i didnt do shit on this yesterday
i had to basically make two songs within the night and ofc that took all my time. it was a few minutes short to midnight by the time i finished the second one, not to mention the laborious vocal sample tweaking which was made for the first song
but i did just finish the kit and made all the loops for it over the course of approx. 3 or so hours.
This leaves one kit to go
after this though i am gonna have to go back and make the claps and percs which percs should be relatively easy, but claps are usually time consuming. i could probably get a good chunk of that done in that session though. I might to a bit more tonight but i fr gotta take a break.


Also I just remembered the account I was using to contact Samplephonics and Prime Loops was taken down and I only remember the samplephonics email, so that's a big fuck in the ass.
Prime Loops is actually pretty prestige (they made that clear in the message through all those labels they contract with and what have ye..) so asking them would be idk. I'll see how this goes and go from there, this is still some motherfucking bullshit, though. Wog.

lol im fucking around in saurus (baesed va synth <3 ) making hat hits and starting from my snare patch i turned the envelope send to the filter backwards a bit and it made that hit sound from rpg maker

finished the last kit last night, might go back and add a few more hits idk. just did a few percs.


btw gonna start timestamping these

(if youre wondering why the last kit only has 2 kicks, I didn't refresh the directory and the other 2 didn't show up)

as it turns out im a retard
accidentally left the "save as ACIDized" tick on for basically all the drum hits. which puts loop markers on the beginning and end of the sound.
so basically i gotta go back and take off the loop markers (which involves dragging into edison, re-exporting.. fuckin tedious shit) for 2 less of every drum hit.
no big deal, it's just a little nick out of my time sound designing.
on the better side im 90% done with drum hits, just gotta do the claps which can be as simple as making a snare sound and modulating the volume. might just do like, one for each drum kit though.

after this im gonna crack down on the drumloops. ive got most in the 140 bpm category done (segregating the drumloops by bars and not bpm was not a thought out idea, fuck that)
speaking of bpm im thinking of splitting the loops in general into 3 bpms, 140, 100 and [idk ill fuckin figure it out]
it does have to have a slow section because i am introducing strong synthwave vibes to it, but muh traditional clown funk is played at 140 cause that leaves room for upbeat grimey shit and halftimes so thats that.

since im not making that many synth multis in comparison to synth-based loops, I think I'll do those first, after the dls. plus gives me a buffer time to get back in the groove of it before putting them to work in melodies.

timestamps next post

prenote: i don't know why I said the saved as acidized makes it loop. that actually makes any loop automatically beatmatched to your project tempo, but loop markers were still showing up on one shots.

TIMESTAMPS GA-FUCKIN-LORE:

It should be noted that not every session was 100% accounted for, resulting in many undocumented hours. Whatever.

You know within the first two weeks or so that I didn't have internet I barely worked on this? Made a few tracks, but when I got back on this I went fucking ham.
Where was I last? Drumloops and hits?
4 Drumloops of each of the 6 or so kits has been been made in the bpms 100, 140, and 160. Actually there are like a few unfinished loops in 150 but w/e I'll get back to them.
In absence I've made about;
-28 Music/Synth Loops
- 17 or so Bass Loops
- 22 Pad/Atmospheric Loops
But each loop typically comes with like 4 different tweaks to it, usually a gate and a pitch change, and combinations thereof, but also modulations and overall different morphs n shit like that. So one loop would have like 4 files and the shit looks like this

So basically the actual file turnout of, for example music loops, would be around 87 Files (weighing just under 300 mb)

I'll get into the nitty gritty of what sounds I went for when making them and what kind of production techniques i used, etc. later when I have more time but rn i'm mostly posting pics to keep up to date.
As you can see from the above picture, these are sorted by key and tempo. Almost every loop using a minor is harmonic minor (because A harmonic minor is fucking bae) and the general focus on minors is supposed to bring out the Artsy Synthwave Horror Movie/Supervillian Making New Age Music feel.
Though there's a good set of drumloops at 160 bpm, I haven't made many melodic loops to connect that so next time I kick this up, that's my aim.
Might release an audio demo soon

FLStudio's been rendering at painful speeds over simple loops for some reason and this is starting to get in the way.
like, a loop that would take 5 seconds to render is taking about 10 minutes

did i say 10 minutes?
i meant fucking 60+
i have no fucking idea what's causing this. this isn't the first time this has happened though
i know one time i just dropped the wav quality from 64 sinc to 32 but i dont want this sample pack to have the sample quality divided like that. plus 24 sinc smfh
this is pretty discouraging to get hard on this project. when I get to the checkpoint I set for atmosphere/pad sounds im gonna go back and do the other melody shit (all of which would be 5 loops wrapping back around to the atmosphere loops which would also be 5 more) and most of the sample pack will be done
after that it's just 12 synth and 12 synth bass multis which are pretty simple enough, 12 riser and crash fx and a shit ton of glitch fx which is mostly already made
coming to a steady end

your computer is a million years old you gotta work around it

try googling stuff

your computer is so old it has a sound card

also how do you have a broken sound card but can still make all this music

I just saw your posts lol ^
it's not necessarily broken in the sense it doesn't work, it just doesn'r work right. Getting FL studio to make sound after I boot it up used to be a huge problem but I did some tweaking. To add insult to injury I operate on an old as fuck sound system - One right speaker (left speaker is broken) with a sub (thankfully enough.) and the speaker wire is fucking flayed so I keep the flayed end near my monitor to tweak it if the speaker cuts out (which is usually the case of the wire ofc). I'm basically a lo-fi producer lol.

I googled some stuff, didn't find anything I haven't already read really so nothing substantial. I restarded the computer and that... Basically fixed the issue. It renders at normal speed now. Given the fact each render has a "Your computer does not have enough memory for this - try cutting a task" error now which has never really occurred in normal instances like these but nonetheless renders the sound no problem with no real artifacts or glitches. I'm not as worried about it but I will have to troubleshoot it soon.

Timestamps:

(unaccounted hours implicit)

Since last time I finished the atmospheric/pad section.
Last few were made at 160 BPM.
Now to get into notes about the sound design process about them. Let me get something to drink this'll take a bit (out of fear of being indefinite and vague).


Alright so when I started focusing on the Pad sounds I tried to keep the general sound very airy and synthetic, lots of analog string and blade type sounds I suppose - If not that, the aim was to be a complete moodswinger. Meeting in the middle on this was a bonus (Firth Strings would be a good example of this, calling to mind some dark ambiences you'd hear in a David Firth cartoon while retaining the distortion and early synthesized orchestral string-type signature-whatever)
The frontrunner vsts used for this section are Saurus, some moog and jupiter clones, and basically everything from the Korg Legacy collection. You won't see much different in the rest of the project because these were like the tools of this sample pack. Of course there are exceptions here and there, some morph-ey samplers were used on a few occasions (particularly on the afformentioned firth strings -- the sample was of a lowpassed choir, some real strings, and some poly6-sounding strings I believe.)

Synthwork, common elements were long attacks (as with most pads), slow pw modulation, subtle filter modulation and some healthy detune. This is a section I also really wanted to bring out the synthwave/outrun elements here, and a good bit of the pads are reflective of it. A lot of that was thanks to unisons - a lot of which was literally cloning the channel and midi of it, and a lot of which was the unison module on Saurus. Some were both, which made for some pretty huge, spacious sounds. The unison based supersaws made some pretty satisfying pads ofc, but another element which became really staple in evoking synthwave was chorus/ensemble- particularly some bee-yuu-tee-ful chorus modules. (looking at you MDE-X <3 )
I used chorus to compliment already-unisoned sounds (again, make shit sound huge) and add more stereo and wetness to dry-er sounds. There wasn't any strongly distinct way I used choruses, mostly just slow modulation and intensity plus a little cut off the high end. EQing for most pads, which were mid-heavy, focused on accentuating mid and upper mid ranges, usually cutting the much lower ends. Usual shit. Compression wasn't anything special either, just a ceiling limiter at -2 db which only came in handy for really distorted sounds and sounds that got too big for their britches. Speaking of distortion, a staple in this sample pack as a whole is subtle, warm, bold anal-log distortion. It was really light here in the pad section but wasn't afraid to go a bit harsher. Two plugins I really want to give a shoutout to in this are Kammerl Kaske's Warm Distorion (yeah it's got a picture of a horse headed woman with tits on it. believe it or not it's the most softcore imagery of the pack. Not the kind of gui i'd go with, but whatever, artist's art.)  and Plusdistortion Small, which I believe is made to imitate like, guitar pedal distortion. It can rip your fucking face off if you push it's limits but in the way I used it, (really soft, about 20-33% of the incoming signal with distortion n 50 or 66% and right before reverb) made it really complimentary to the atmosphere.  (Looking at that site again now I think I might just check out their other stuff...)
Speaking of reverb, usage was split about 50/50 between MDE-X's reverb modules and Valhalla's hq reverb stuff. I never really use a lot of reverb built into the synth I'm using, usually only in trace amounts to leave room for the big boys.
For a few pad sounds here and there I ran them through a patcher with the original signal going straight out, then two signals of it going to two harmonizers with slight detunes and then panned in a way like, the negative detune favoring theleft ear and the positive detune favoring right. It was pretty important to keep the detuned signals fairly subverted and overpowered by the original. Otherwise it takes away from the subtlelty of the effect and makes it sound really messy in confusing, at least in my experience. Having slighter detunes (for example, a few cents insead of a whole semitone) does come with more liberty for volume but it's not that important.

Recurring back to the pad synthwork, some (filter) modulation was curteousy of the "random square" setting on Saurus's lfos (And Camelphat's lfos). That thing is like essential for so many sounds I consider to define my bullshit genre lol. A quick example of it in action on a pad sound: Zoo Wee Mama!

Going on to the secondaries of the sound such as gating and mod.
All of the gating (with the exception of that heard in glitchy effects) comes from FL Studio's native gating and rhythmizing plugin, Grossbeat. Most gates were based in the wave section, the typical pattern being like a rising sidechain-ey sound then a wave. I'm going to put a visual example here so I don't sound like an inarticulate ass.



So it's like, coming in and waving. That's like all I can really say to describe it. This was the most common kind of gate but of course there are variations.  Some, on longer pads, did the same thing but didn't have another rise on the 2/4 beat so it was just like, rising then one continuous wave til' the next beat. This gating style on lower bpms made the gating a bit more easy-going. Some, though much fewer gates are just a straight up wave. I only used this on like really developed pads.
Moost of the gating was used to established a kind of dignified rhythmic value that makes it fit well with the drum beats n whatehaveyou
The common gate I used can be heard in this example,  while an uncommon one can be heard here.

The mods, to summarize the "modded" subsection from my point, it's basically where I take the finished sound, stand back, and say "Okay, how can I really fuck this up?"

This usually leads to;
-Heavy as fuck glitching
-Upping the distortion on whatever I used initially
-Filter movement in the shape of ramps or randomized squares
-Rotaries on rotaries on rotaries (basically really deep/resonant flanging)

Common core on the glitching was retrigger/grain delay whatever you call it which does produce some interesting sounds on pads, reversers, and tapestops (really slow at the beginning or end or really fast in short rhythmic bursts). The retriggers were usually on the last and half step of a beat and acted almost transitory, usually preceded by the reverse which is decently subtle when dealing with pads. Some secondary and less-used glitching here was beatshuffling/rhythmizing which when used was used noticably but nothing over-the-top.
Most of the distortion was still under limit. example if it was at 33%  it'd go up to 50%, 66%, or 75%.
Filter movement with Camelphat, most of the time the filter was accounting for 60-80% of the signal to make things like, a little muddier in one respect but make things not exclusively obscured in the other, as to leave room for other stuff to do with the signal and shit.  Since I was using camelphat I also ended up throwing in touches of distortion and flanger in the mix. Throwing in the primary flangers and rotaries usually only had one really slow and subtle, but there were a few instances where it would be like one massive flanger slow modulated and going really deep would be stacked under one going at a medium speed at like a negative depth so it would sound really liquidy and like, motion-ing. Common case, an analog ensemble/chorus was used as glue between the mod subsection which made shit sound really wet. I usually put some more distortion after flangers/rotaries to make the sound kinda wrap back around and come together. This distortion would be like, the original distortion before I pushed it up for the mod section, which is a reason why the amped up distortion isn't pushed to the top.

That's all I have to really note about the pads n shit for now. I covered a shit ton of stuff in this post like the gates and mods, so there won't be much to mention about them in the next sections except when I point out any possible discrepancies.

Is this method of sound design ridiculously convoluted? Yes. That's the spirit of clownfunk!

Example of full pad sound; with original, gated, mod, and gated mod.
It's also not uncommon for, when I'm done with a sound, do a secondary mod which usually consists of a repitch and different mod,

yeets, it took me two hours to type all that shit up. ONLY TO REMEMBER I FORGOT TO DESCRIBE THE ATMOSPHERIC SOUNDS HAHA.

Basically there are 9 soundscape-y "Atmos" sounds that have no mod or gate so there's nothing to say there. They were mostly designed in Gladiator to convey a certain atmosphere ofc or just be digigarble.

Here's a fucking third of them.
Really meticulous and experiment-based design with wave sequencing and what not. Really don't know what to say about it mostly because my brain's fried from writing that fucking novel up there ^

i only read the part where you responded to me but jesus dude if the cord is frayed on the speakers use duct tape or something then buy some "new" ones at a pawn shop

lmao i gotta pay for shit sonn
I've been meaning to, I just ain't got the dough and it's lower on my priority. Until it gets completely unusable I'll make do with it. I really gotta buy a pc first, and it'll take a while getting the $ up for it.