Review of Flood – ambient drones and samples by Mode Audio

Mode Audio has introduced Flood – ambient drones and samples, a 1.88Gb collection of an immense, hallucinogenic blend of pulverising bass, shimmering SFX, crackling sonic atmosphere and lilting analog synth haze. This selection of fraying noise textures, rumbling resonance and glitch-oriented SFX is nothing short of a dazzling feast of inventive sound design, making this one of Mode Audio’s widest-ranging and multi-faceted ambient releases to date.

It is available in Wav format from Mode Audio (£20 regular price).

This sample pack contains 189 files in six different folders, namely ‘Atmospheres’, ‘Basses’, ‘Drones’, ‘SFX’, ‘Textures’ and ‘Drones’ folders. Many of the atmospheres, textures and drones are long samples, in the region of 1 – 2 minutes.  

‘Atmospheres’ contains a wide range of atmospheric sounds from wind chime, dusty analog string / synth to mechanical / industrial. They have a subtle movement and some have an edgy or haunting quality.

‘Basses’ contains a range of gnarly, rumbling and rhythmic bass sounds.

‘Drones’ contains a range of pad, string, keys and synth drones. These are typically long samples with a slightly saturated sound and a subtle movement.

‘SFX’ contains a range of impact, metallic, robotic and electrical type sounds that are ideal for creating rhythmic or contrasting elements.

‘Subs’ contains a range of rumbling and rattly sub-basses that add interesting movement and rhythmic elements.

‘Textures’ contains a range of metallic, impact, rattly, mechanical type sounds that have an edgy feel, adding rhythmic and contrasting elements.

Verdict

What I love about Flood is that it is so versatile. The sounds are brilliantly atmospheric and well suited to not only ambient sounds but also a wider range such as downtempo and soundscapes. There’s a bit of everything from analog lofi, glitchy, noisy to brooding textures.

The samples layer excellently together and allow you to create rhythmic or looping patterns as well as evolving soundscapes and furthermore are ideally suited to further processing in samplers or with effects.

I’ve created the five track EP ‘deluge’ embedded at the beginning of the post to highlight the sort of sounds that you can produce with the pack. I’ve used a number of effects including Fracture XT and Subvert (Glitchmachines), Shaperbox 2 (Cableguys) as well as various reverbs – SP2016 and Blackhole (Eventide) and delays – DDLY (iZotope), Incipit (Inear Display) and H949 Dual Harmoniser (Eventide).

All tracks arranged, produced and mastered in MuLab 8 using Saturn 2, Pro-Q 3 and Pro-L 2 (Fabfilter) and Stage (Fiedler Audio).

Loopmasters and Loopcloud launch #Stayinspired – free plugins, tutorials and sounds

Following April’s #StayInCreate initiative, Loopmasters have teamed up with their friends at Plugin Boutique, Pulsar Audio, W.A Production, Baby Audio & Producertech to bring you another giveaway of Free Plugins, Courses and Sounds to help producers everywhere to #StayInspired.

Producers can find out more and access these deals from the Loopcloud Blog.

Free Sounds: Loopcloud gives you access to 4 million sounds right inside your DAW, in tempo and in key with your current project. Start a free trial of Loopcloud’s Studio plan and you’ll get an Exclusive 1GB Stay Inspired Vocal Pack, 1GB Welcome Pack, up to 750 free samples per month, plus over 300 points to spend on sounds which you’ll get to keep even if you cancel your trial period.

Free Courses: Producertech’s All Access Membership gives users unlimited access to 400+ hours of tutorials, over 10GB of Loopmasters samples, hundreds of projects and presets, plus written notes and assessments. While all this usually costs £9.99 per month, Producertech is extending their free access period (usually 14 days) by an extra three months, helping you to kick your tracks up a gear with expert tutorials and resources.

Free Plugin: Usually £25, I Heart NY by Baby Audio gives you that punchy, powerful sound without setting up parallel routing in your DAW. The Spank control lets you add an extra edge to the parallel compression process, heating up your audio even further.

Free Plugin: Vocal Splitter is a plugin for turning mono vocals into thick, modern-sounding stereo ready to add to a track. Not only have W.A Production taken a classic effect applied to vocals and made it easier to perform, but they’ve also added more customisation into the bargain.

Free Plugin: Smasher by Pulsar Audio is a plugin emulation of the legendary Urei 1176 compressor. This effect can give you an explosive sound on a drum bus, add body and sustain to a snare sound, and bring out the bite in a bass guitar.

Review of ChordPotion 2 midi sequencer and effect plugin (VST / AU) by FeelYourSound

Introduction

FeelYourSound has released version 2.0.0 of their MIDI sequencer and effect plug-in ChordPotion (VST + AU).

Chord Potion is typically priced at 45 EUR / $49. ChordPotion 2 is a free update for all ChordPotion 1 users.

Celebration deal: Enter the code “Celebration” at the checkout page to get 10% off. Save up to 20% with special bundle prices that are available until 9th July 2020.

The ChordPotion demo is available here

Background

ChordPotion is a composition and performance tool. It can turn any chord progression into new riffs and melodies instantly.

The basic concept is simple: You play your chords in your DAW, send them to ChordPotion, and ChordPotion generates new notes for you that are played on your favorite synth. You can also export the generated notes as standard MIDI files and edit them later on.

The plug-in contains four parallel sequencers. You can create and edit your own sequences from scratch or load one of the many factory patterns to build your own chord transformers.

This video shows ChordPotion in action and explains the user interface:

You can expand ChordPotion with preset packages to cover even more playing styles. For ChordPotion 2, FeelYourSound teamed up with game composer Denis Comtesse to create three free new preset packs:

“Keys Mix“: A selection of keyboard presets for various genres (Rock, Pop, Ballads, Blues, Jazz, Reggae, Soul).

“Golden Guitar“: Picked and strummed guitars patterns. From folk to triplets to classic playing styles.

“Time Oddity“: Various presets for odd meters like 3/4, 5/4, 6/8, and 7/8. Spice up your songs with some arpeggios, basslines, rhythmic chords, or strumming lines.

In-Use

The interface is clean and well laid out.  The top section has 12 page buttons so you can work with different ideas or switch between presets; a sound button to activate the in-built piano sound and the midi drag and drop button.

The bottom bar has swing and octave options along with the preset browser and clipboard, copy save and paste buttons.

Speaking of presets, these are an excellent way to hear the sort of sounds that ChordPotion can produce. There are a range including pop, hip hop, beat, backbeat, edm and piano and there are also a number of expansion packs available like those outlined above.

Creating your own sounds is straightforward and easy and these are designed in the middle part of the interface that has four separate rows to transform incoming chord notes.  You can solo / mute each row, change the velocity, speed and octave for each row and also decide if it plays once or repeats.  For the chord row, patterns are applied to each input note and the melody rows play monophonic riffs like arpeggios and basslines that combine to create complex polyphonic rhythms.  You can also set a different midi channel for each row.

At the end of each row are 2 fx slots that allow you to add a number of options including add notes, remove notes, randomise notes, randomise note length and randomise velocity.  There are also 2 master fx slots.

You can edit a lot of the patterns which brings up a step sequencer window.  

Each step is shown as 0, 1, 2, – or #.  A zero is the bass note of the chord (or all notes), one is the second note (or first inversion) and two is the third note (or third) inversion; – is a blank field and # stops the currently played note.  If you right-click a step you can set the probability of various options such as turning a step into – or #, randomise note, velocity, octave.

ChordPotion will transpose notes as soon as it receives them and the generated output notes are automatically recorded and when you stop your DAW you can drag and drop the midi file.  If you set up each row to a different midi channel, when you export it will export multi-midi files rather than a single midi file. 

Conclusions

This is an excellent compositional tool that takes a different approach to some other similar tools, starting with a chord progression that you create and then ChordPotion enables you to create intricate and complex sounds.

It works very well on instruments as well as percussive sounds and can create simple single melodies such as basslines or arpeggios or much more complex polyphonic rhythms.

What I really like is that it is such an inspiring tool and best of all, fun to use. It’s easy to get to grips with and sounds very musical, the randomise options and fx allow you to add natural variation that means the mechanical feel you get with some sequencers doesn’t happen with ChordPotion. You can feed ChordPotion very simple progressions and it will convert them into full harmonies instantly improving your arrangements.

The export midi function is an excellent addition, this allows you to tweak or save your own midi files for future use, the multi-file export is very handy to save separate melodies and basslines for example.