Sound designer Mike Kiraly has created a free sample pack of salvaged drum loops, layered looping textures, hybrid drum hits, and ghost rhythms to help inspire your music productions. Also, check out his story behind the creation of this sample pack along with some solid sound design techniques.
Dubspot Sounds V1 by Mike Kiraly
Dubspot is proud to team up with New York-based sound designer Mike Kiraly to present Dubspot Sounds V1, a handcrafted sample library containing salvaged drum loops, layered looping textures, hybrid drum hits, and ghost rhythms suitable for any music style. The collection was crafted using Native Instruments Reaktor, Twisted Tools Ultraloop, Sugar-Bytes Looperator and Effectrix, Audio Damage’s Automation, Ableton Live, Korg’s Wavestation EXan, Roland’s D-20, Yamaha’s TX802, a Zoom H6, Logic Pro’s Space Designer, various drum and rhythmic loops, and miscellaneous field recordings.
Sample Pack Details
- All loops are tempo-labeled
- Royalty-Free
- 145 MB Download
- 65 24-bit / 44.1 kHz Wav files
- 15 Drum Loops
- 5 Ghost Rhythms
- 30 Hybrid Hits
- 15 Texture Loops
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The Story Behind the Creation Process by Mike Kiraly
Sometimes the job of a sound designer is to create a very specific sound for a very particular purpose. However, the quality and character of that sound can be difficult to describe objectively. For example, let’s say that I get asked to design a large booming drum hit that has an organic texture to it. That description can mean many things to many people. Occasionally I hit the mark on the first or second attempt. But that’s a rare occurrence.
In most cases there is a lot of back-and-forth communication until subjective descriptions morph into shared understanding. However, until that happens I usually end up generating a large excess of rejected samples that will never be used for that particular project or assignment. Available hard drive space is a valuable commodity in my studio and storing passed over samples seems like a flagrant waste of such a scarce resource. Alternatively, I could file them away to be rediscovered, revived, and repurposed at a later date. Often, that’s exactly what I chose to do.
The downloadable file accompanying this article contain samples which have been formed by recycling old, unused or rejected audio files created for various projects spanning the last several years. I will spend a little time below talking about the idea behind each grouping of samples and how I used previously discarded content to generate this new material. These samples are royalty-free and can be used in your own productions.
Salvaged Drum Loops
More often than not, unused drum loops on my hard drive remain unused because they lacked some quality that made them worth developing further. However, that doesn’t mean they won’t have value for me in the future. I often take old loops and implement various methods of cutting, rearranging or mangling that I’ve grown fond of over the years.
These drum loops are mostly cut and paste collages constructed from several different categories of drum loops created at different times over the years. There are loops from old tracks that were never finished, loops from poorly played live percussion recordings, and loops from content I had created for sound design projects that never fully materialized.
For this particular batch, I explored ensembles within Native Instrument’s Reaktor that focus on sample and loop processing. It seems that people shy away from Reaktor, especially for sample manipulation and, in my opinion, that’s a huge mistake. There are a staggering wealth of remarkable tools available to Reaktor users, many that come bundled with the program. For the bold amongst you, the wealth of user made ensembles available via the Native Instruments website is astonishing.
If you listen to the loops, you’ll probably notice contrasting elements that are stitched together. They are hybrids, mixed together from audio created at different times with different tools and for different objectives. When mashed together they create a sum greater than its parts.
Gear Used: Native Instruments Reaktor, Twisted Tools Ultraloop, Sugar-Bytes Looperator and Effectrix, Audio Damage Automation, Ableton Live Follow Actions, and an abundance of abandoned (bad?) drum loops.
Layered Looping Textures
One of my favorite things to design is rhythmic textures and ambiances. I think it must be my house music roots that push my brain to respond to repetitive sounds. Sometimes looping textures can be difficult to work with for producers and composers looking to buy and use third party samples. The primary reason is that, unlike drum loops, looping textures doesn’t always sound good when expanded or compressed to accommodate different tempos. Drum loops generally have empty space between individual hits and they can be stretched by changing the length of those spaces. Time stretching can often result in tempo changes which can have minimal impact on the quality of the original loop. Textures, like the ones accompanying this article, can be sonically dense. Any attempts to change the tempo will have to include some manipulation of the sound itself, which will lead to processing artifacts. Technology has improved greatly, and there are several programs out there that do an amazing job of minimizing these artifacts, but there are limits to what they can do, and a looping texture tends to lose its usability the more extreme the change in tempo.
These samples were recycled from an overflow of pads and risers that were generated for a third-party Kontakt instrument, but ultimately rejected because the intention was for them to be time stretched over a large range of tempos. The source material originated from a variety of different raw audio files I had generated over the years. The selection was almost random. The layers that make up these loops are comprised of unused field recordings and a selection of forgotten pad samples I made from digital synths from the 80’s and 90’s.
I was aiming for a slightly ominous, atonal sound and this was achieved by importing and layering a random selection of the source audio files without regard to musical key. After recording the jumbled mess, I sliced out loops that I thought had an interesting character to them.
The last part of the process was to create a sense of shared space for the newly merged layers. I did this by placing a reverb over the master with the mix level set to less than 10% and the decay at it’s shortest setting. It added a touch of ambiance to make the combined sounds feel like they co-exist in the same environment. The entire process took less than a few hours and I ended up with a large number of new loops that I felt had a unique and compelling feel.
Gear Used: Miscellaneous field recordings, spare recordings of pads created by a Korg Wavestation EX, Roland D-20, and a Yamaha TX802.
Hybrid Drum Hits
Field recordings are the best way to stand out from the crowd. I can promise you that your carefully mixed 808 snare drum will sound like a million other 808 snare drums, but a recording of you hitting a watermelon with a baseball bat wrapped in aluminum foil will never, ever be duplicated.
When I venture outside to capture the sounds of the world I try my best not to waste any opportunities that present themselves. For me, that means getting the most out of each sound and I try to ensure that by capturing as many takes as possible. If I bang a garden rake against a wheelbarrow, I won’t just do it once. I’ll do it 10-20 times with varying placement, speed, intensity, etc.
Even though each one of those hits is inherently different from the others, it will still result in an excess of sounds that feel very similar. So I will take the least interesting of the audio files and randomly layer them with other field recording outcasts. Once combined, I gain a vast array of complex hits that have a vibrant, organic feel to them. Best of all, they are sounds that I can guarantee no one else in the world has.
Gear Used: Zoom H6, various yard tools, and safety glasses.
Ghost Rhythms
Sometimes you can have an excellent collection of percussive hits that get wasted on a terrible rhythmic pattern. Due to my lack of solid timing, this seems to happen to me all the time. While my instinct is to drag these poorly conceived loops into the trash, I know that I can use them as raw material for convolution reverb processing.
The trick here is to ignore the intended purpose of a convolution reverb, which is to accurately model a real-world acoustic space. Convolution reverb plug-ins generally achieve this by reading a prepared audio file which contains a sonic fingerprint of each location. Some convolution reverbs, however, allow you to swap those audio files with your own. The result is a reverb sound that assimilates the character and rhythmic feel of your audio material.
This method can be a hit-or-miss process since there really is no way to accurately predict how your imported audio file will influence the sound of the reverb. However, it can be worth the time it takes to explore this process. The samples labeled ‘Ghost Rhythms’ are a result of this exploration. I collected a group of old percussion loops and used them as fodder for the convolution reverb which was then used to process other rhythmic loops. What came out was a group of distant sounding, polyrhythmic drum patterns with a decidedly preternatural quality.
Gear Used: Logic Pro Space Designer and various old, unused rhythmic loops.
About Mike Kiraly
Mike Kiraly is a New York-based music producer and sound designer. Check out his Cinematic Synth FX sample library available now at Big Fish Audio here.
Connect with Mike on Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud | Website
Sound Design Program
Become fluent in the language of sound design and synthesis with this comprehensive program. This six-level Sound Design program uses Native Instruments’ Komplete as a platform for learning synthesis and sampling techniques. Starting with an introduction to the properties of sound, this comprehensive series of courses covers the major techniques used for contemporary sound design.
Click here to view the embedded video.
What’s Included:
Sound Design Level 1: Introduction to Komplete
Sound Design Level 2: Synthesis with Massive, FM8 and Absynth
Sound Design Level 3: Sampling with Kontakt and Battery
Sound Design Level 4: Advanced Sound Design
Sound Design Level 5: Reaktor Ensembles and Production Techniques
Sound Design Level 6: Reaktor Programming and Instrument Building
Become fluent in the language of sound design and synthesis with this comprehensive program. This six-level Sound Design program uses Native Instruments’ Komplete as a platform for learning synthesis and sampling techniques. Starting with an introduction to the properties of sound, this comprehensive series of courses covers the major techniques used for contemporary sound design.
You will learn to create your own sounds with a variety of techniques and add a personal sonic signature to your tracks. We introduce you to the latest synthesis and sampling technologies and show you how to use the world’s largest and most diverse sound library. In the advanced levels, you will acquire total control over all aspects of the Komplete instruments while practicing genre-based sound design.
Click here for detailed information on this program, including start dates and payment plans.
If you have questions, please call 877.DUBSPOT or send us a message.
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