› freesound.org samples used

‹ freesound.org samples used

• acoustic session 3.wav by sandib  License: CC0

• acoustic session 8.wav by sandib  License: CC0

• Girl singing random melody by buggly  License: CC0

• female singing freestyle melody by buggly  License: CC0

• girl freestyle scatting melody by buggly  License: CC0

• Choral Chord with Breaths.wav by blackbar  License: CC0

• Tambourine 2-bars loop 90BPM 48kHz by funkologic  License: CC0

• Tambourine - Various Strikes by funkologic  License: CC0

• Real drums loop 100 BPM.wav by johntrap  License: CC0

• Rock beat loop 19 - Roseanna sortof.wav by bigjoedrummer  License: CC0

• VHS Drumkit (pack) by AKUSTIKA  All samples licensed: CC0

• Drums Kit Summer 2020 (pack) by Uberproduktion  All samples licensed: CC0

• fill - 16sh - crash.wav by bigjoedrummer  License: CC0

• Drumloops 110bpm + Singles (pack) by RytmenPinnen  All samples licensed: CC0

› M8 nerd notes

‹ M8 nerd notes

freesound.org CC0 sample library
I've been making a lot of sample-heavy tracks recently, testing an M8-optimized sample library I'm building out of CC0-only audio sourced (solely) from freesound.org  The goal is to have a collection of decent samples that stream well from an SD card are 100% safe to bundle into M8 projects and share.  Each filename includes its freesound source's sample/pack ID, which keeps attribution and CC0 license verification possible at any time.  I've been using these to generate the URLs in the 'freesound.org samples used' section.

Tuning and timing
A major challenge this week is that many of these samples drift in tune and timing.  Getting them all in tune/tempo with each other (and the M8's on-board synths) was a task, and keeping them there involved a fair amount of amount of backtracking and tweaking PIT & FIN mid-phrase.  This tweaking ended up with a surprising amount of REP to compensate for increasingly off-key drifts over time.

Tuning vs timing
The M8 doesn't time-stretch.  There is a well-known LFO time-stretching trick, but it's very hard for that to not sound janky. So I generally do everything 90s jungle-style and alter timing by re-pitching.  I even wrote an M8 BPM-change-to-pitch calculator to make it easier.  But―when a sample needs correction for tune and timing at the same time―things need to get more creative.  The solution in this case was to keep pitch for tuning and juggle the playhead back and forth for timing.  In M8 terms, this mean SLI+STA/LEN to position the playhead, then alternating the direction FWD and REV to keep the same timbre without losing the position.

PP
It's pretty common (for me) to juggle a sampler's playhead direction with PLY01 and PLY02.  But it's mostly useful to close very small gaps—like keeping the "air" going between funky drum hits, or trippy guitar effects).  This time, the holds were quite long and tonal.  So I switched the playheads to loop with PLY05 (REV PP) and PLY04 (FWD PP), which automatically ping-pong in the opposite direction after reaching the end of their sample.  However: loop modes like FWD PP/REV PP ignore STA fx.  In most cases, I'd already placed the playheads with STA and wasn't going to recalculate using LOP and LEN.  So the fun trick this time was to start with STA using a FWD-mode instrument, then switch to PP mode using PLY05 & 04 in order to juggle long stretches.