Last night we did the first recording tests in the church I want to record the next Alchemy Bank in. The acoustics are very good, it's a smaller church from the 13th century on the outskirts of Berlin, it has a wooden ceiling and the floor is covered with rugs so the reverb is rather short and subtle which is great for this project. For the tests we recorded some french horn swells, some of my sax playing, gongs and chains and other goodies using my typical L-C-R setup with 3 mics. After editing the samples I will make some first patches from this material, maybe I can make one today and post the result on the Alchemy subscription page.

This will be great!

Here is a first test using a soprano sax phrase recorded in the church processed in Alchemy - 2 sources - Granular and Resynth mode:

http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/saxphrase-church-alche my-demo

Oh la la. Sounds wonderful! You're definitively making a dent in my economy with all the superb releases of Alchemy sound banks. Yay to that!

Thank you and sorry for that - a "dent in my economy" still sounds sort of positive though

Excellent, as usual.

You're planning on putting this on the subscription page?

Haven't decided yet, it might also be the first patch for the new Bank, I have to check all the samples from yesterday's recording session first and develop a strategy what to do with those exactly...

Now the answer is yes, I just uploaded the patch "Saxphrase Church" to the subscription page where it can be downloaded by all subscribers using their Login info to unlock the link.

Here is a first demo for the Dark Brass Bank making use of 48 multisampled French Horn samples recorded some months ago in the church I wrote about, edited and truncated this morning - 2 velocities, 2x Round Robin, sampled over nearly 3 octaves, every minor third, sometimes in 2 semitone steps. With the sample start control you can move the samples in so the swell gets shorter, or starts right at the maximum dynamic point of the swell. I skipped the weird Snaps in this demo as I wanted to make a pure sounding brass demo first.
I will not record the next sample session in that church again, I've come to the conclusion that sampling dry in a proper studio will leave the user with many more options to the sculpt the sound. It's nice to have those church horns included in this Bank anyway.
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/church-horns-2vel-rr2- demo

That's my preference, too.

I've always felt that any ambiance, presence, and/or reverb is like salt and pepper: easy to add, hard to remove, and everyone likes a different amount.

But, I also agree that that brass sound in the demo is lovely.

Thank's for chiming in, Jim - especially when resynthing those church horns and other recordings I made in that church, in some experiments I noticed that resynthesizing ambience and reverb sounds pretty poor, I knew that before but I had to be convinced again, one of the reasons not to follow the initial concept.

This guy knows sampling!!! Amazing works of art,recordings are incredible.
Question will there be the possibility of some stacked dark brass ensemble patches when released?

Great recordings,thanks for sharing!!!

Thank's a lot!
By stacked you mean multiple instruments at once? If so, yes - I plan to have at least one sampling session with 3 or more brass players (e.g. 2 trombones + tuba) playing swells, layered dynamics, portato style, hits, blasts and so forth.
I will also make patches where I artificially layer several single instruments on top of each other to make these huge brass sounds.

Simon, how's it going with the DBaW expansion? Looking forward to it.

After my big concert on Saturday premiering the orchestral work I've been working on for so many months I will continue to work on the Dark Brass Bank, atm patchpool has to step back a bit as my composer's life is so time- and energy consuming.