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samplemagic.comThere are some things in dance music that never change. Re-sampled drums are one of them. Producers have been sampling hits from records since electronic music’s embryonic beginnings. Fom early rave anthems to boundary-breaking D&B, east coast house to chillwave, our thirst for warm, fat, airy drum sounds – bristling with tape saturation or vinyl girth – remains unquenched.
At SM we love tape, we love vinyl. Always have done, always will do. And in SM43 Vinyl & Tape Drum Hits we’ve taken that love affair to its conclusion, selecting 1,200+ of our favourite drum hits from across the SM catalogue, running them through £20,000+ worth of hardware then pressing them to vinyl for our most treasured drum collection to date.
Divided into folders for Vinyl, Tape,
Tape to Vinyl, Cassette and Desk,
we’ve gone all-out to create an infinitely useable and diverse selection – whatever genre of music you create. In the Vinyl folder you’ll find hits which have been pressed and cut to a 45rpm dub plate with a Neumann VMS80 lathe, SAL 84 rack and SX74 cutting
head. The resulting hits – warm, crispy, alive – give you instant old school flavours.
The Tape folder – featuring hits tracked to industry-leading Quantegy TG-9 tape on a classic Studer A80 – offers a more rounded sound, the transients gently tamed and the high-end sensitively pulled back.
The Cassette folder takes things further, with more aggressive transient smashing and even more grit and noise for an obvious lo-fi feel, perfect for chillwave, french house – even electro beats. To round things off, Vinyl to Tape delivers a double-whammy of processing for audible analogue crunch while the
Desk folder offers the direct opposite
– the cleanest sounds of all passed through an enviable outboard chain. To get you started, we’ve created 15 genre-based drum kits covering house, techno, disco, funk, chillwave and more. They’re only starting points, but they’ll give you a feel for the wide range of genres that these hits will slay. Enjoy our tribute to the golden days of recording and production.
The Producers
welcome to...
welcome to
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kit list
the Vinyl & Tape Drum Hits studio
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Pre-production:
Focusrite Blue 315 pre-amp
Maselec MEA-2 EQ
Waves MaxxBCL limiter
Thermionic Culture Phoenix valve compressor
Vinyl:
Neumann VMS 70 lathe (SAL 74C rack and SX74 cutting head)
Tape and domestic casette:
Studer A80 tape machine
Quantegy TG-9 tape
pro tips
making more
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of the sounds
Lo-fi
Record your sounds into old samplers, tape machines – even onto VHS tape – then export them back into your DAW. Older analogue kit, no matter how ‘consumer’, can deliver the classically organic sound found in so many chillwave tracks. If you don’t have access to this kind of equipment, then tape saturation plugins and bit-crushers using 8-bit settings can give sounds a similar, if not identical, lo-fi aesthetic. Side-chain pumping: beyond the basics Side-chain-driven pumping, usually triggered by the kick, is found on numerous chillwave tracks. But you can be more creative than using the standard four-to-the-floor kick as trigger. For greater control, and to give a dominant kick space to cut through a full mix, trigger the sidechain using a clap or snare that has been shifted a few milliseconds before the kick. Another trick is to use a more complex percussive pattern to shape the rhythm of a sustained pad or vocal line. Shift & Match
Chillwave recordings often make heavy use of pitch-shifted and time-stretched samples – frequently from
’80s hits. Recreate the sound using your own samples shifted and stretched using the lowest fidelity algorithms to downgrade the sound and introduce the wandering tonality that is a trademark of the genre. Two tricks that work particularly well: one, shift vocal ‘oohs’down then add reverb to create soundscapes; two, pitch disco basslines up an octave for a full-bodied lead. All about the source sounds You don’t get the right dish using the wrong ingredients. Chillwave ingredients are sourced from ’80s synths and drum machines – old Roland, Korg, Sequential Circuits and Akai machines. But don’t be straitjacketed by the norm. Seek out niche and lesser-known devices from the era and either use them or find samples from them. Full bodied drums demand layers Given the sparsity of their patterns, chillwave drum sounds have to be BIG, filling wide frequency estate. Layered drums are the key, giving you the scope to precisely sculpt the sonic tonality of a single hit. The most common technique is to layer a live hit with that from a drum machine (Linn Drum typically) for a heavy-hitting organic/synth hybrid.
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making more
folder setup
accessing
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the files
Vinyl & Tape
Drum Hits
cassette desk tape tape to vinyl vinylclaps (clap/snare, high-end, layered, synethic) hi-hats (open, closed) kicks (live, machine, processed) percussion and cymbals (clicks & sticks, cymbals, fx, glitch, shakers, toms, tribal)
snares (live, machine, processed) claps (clap/snare, high-end, layered, synthetic) hi-hats (open, closed) kicks (live, machine, processed) percussion and cymbals (clicks & sticks, cymbals, fx, glitch, shakers, toms, tribal) snares (live, machine, processed) claps (clap/snare, high-end, layered, synthetic) hi-hats (open, closed) kicks (live, machine, processed) percussion and cymbals (clicks & sticks, cymbals, fx, glitch, shakers, toms, tribal) snares (live, machine, processed) claps (clap/snare, high-end, layered, synthetic) hi-hats (open, closed) kicks (live, machine, processed) percussion and cymbals (clicks & sticks, cymbals, fx, glitch, shakers, toms, tribal) snares (live, machine, processed) claps (clap/snare, high-end, layered, synthetic) hi-hats (open, closed) kicks (live, machine, processed) percussion and cymbals (clicks & sticks, cymbals, fx, glitch, shakers, toms, tribal) snares (live, machine, processed)
Executive production by Lukas Lyrestam Thanks to Curved Pressings curvedpressings.com Demos by
Sami Liuski, Lazar Dacian, Israel Medina
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Artwork by IWANT Design Limited
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