Free pack of zappy (i.e. goa/psytrance-style) electronic bassdrums

[Music Engineer]

In the last couple of days, I have been tinkering with a new algorithm to synthesize electronic bassdrum sounds and I created a little sample pack with it. Here is a playthrough:



The pack itself can be grabbed here:

www.rs-met.com/sounds/samples/ZappyKicks.7z

and is released under a creative commons license.

[Music Engineer]

From the ReadMe file in the pack:


A pack of samples that can be used as electronic bassdrums or, depending on the parameters, for
"zap" sounds. The samples are all based on impulse responses of a specifically tuned chain of
allpass filters. This means, the initial raw material has a *perfectly* white spectrum because the
impulse itself is perfectly white and an allpass has a white magnitude spectrum by definition. The
idea for this was inpired by a statement of Ady Scorb in this video at 9:57:

"The philosophy I've come up with is: a kickdrum is like an impulse smeared in time. You want to
represent all the frequencies smoothly all the way down. This has the benefit of exciting every
frequency in a space and therefore you'll gonna get less nulls, less peaks and better translation
and better power in more spaces."

The technique of feeding an impulse into an allpass filter achieves exactly that - smearing an
impulse in time - in a mathematically perfect way. A bit of post-processing has been applied,
though: the initially white output of the allpass chain has been filtered by a first order lowpass
to give the spectrum a -6 dB/oct slope. Then, some subsonic mud has been removed by DC blocker
highpass. Then a smooth fade-out was applied.

Although the samples can be used as is, they are mainly meant to be used as raw material for
further shaping. Out of the box, the samples as such are completely atonal. If you like tuned
bassdrums, you may want to process them further by perhaps boosting some frequency around your
fundamental with a peaking filter or maybe a resonant highpass.

The samples were created algorithmically by Robin Schmidt and are released under the Creative
Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 License. See:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[enroe]

Thank you - a great set of kick drums that have a complete
white spectrum - and can therefore be tuned very well.
Thanks to you - and of course to the author "Robin Schmidt"!

[Music Engineer]

Thank you - a great set of kick drums that have a complete
white spectrum - and can therefore be tuned very well.
Thanks to you - and of course to the author "Robin Schmidt"!

That's me as well. Thank you! The spectrum of the end result is actually brown, i.e. has a -6 dB/oct lowpass characteristic - like brown noise or a sawtooth wave. I have a applied a one-pole lowpass as post-processing step after recording the (white) impulse responses of the allpass chain.

Edit: oh - I should perhaps say, the spectrum is red rather than brown:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_noise

"... The term "Brown noise" does not come from the color, but after Robert Brown, ..."

btw.: Try "tuning" the samples with FS=0 (FS stands for (F)requency-(S)hape (a parameter that controls, how the allpass tuning frequencies are distributed), NS stands for (N)umber of allpass (S)tages). With FS=0 (the samples with the flat amplitude envelope), the sample looks self-similar - if you zoom in into an initial section, it will look basically the same as when zoomed out. This implies that playing the sample back faster or slower doesn't really change its sound very much (aside from reduced bandwidth on slowing down). That's a kinda weird feature for a sample to have