Steinberg releases Polarities for Padshop 2 - new sound library by Simon Stockhausen

[Sampleconstruct]

Steinberg have just released my sound library Polarities for Padshop 2, I worked 4.5 months on this and I'm extremely happy with its outcome.

*255 Presets
*3.68 GB of samples (48 kHz/24 Bit)

Polarities for Padshop 2 juxtaposes electronic and acoustic sounds, exploring extreme sonic territories which clash with, oppose or compliment each other. This confrontation between two poles can happen in various ways: either inside a patch by e.g. morphing the sound from frozen/static to animated/moving, from tonal/harmonic to dissonant/noisy, from ethereal/divine to dark/evil or by splitting polarized sounds on the keyboard. The juxtaposition can also occur between presets, the patch names give a hint of what to expect and often function as a more abstract and conceptual thematization.
The new spectral oscillator introduced in Padshop 2 was used predominantly as it has opened a door to new ways of manipulating audio and transforming common timbres into fascinating wondrous sounds. Quite a few presets make use of the new arpeggiator creating polyrhythmic textures where the polarization happens between two different time signature or layering a pitch sequence with a pad or drone sound.
All patches have the modulation wheel assigned, many also use aftertouch. In many cases the modulation wheel drastically changes the timbre of a sound and/or introduces tempo-synced or free modulations also using only the controller lanes of the arpeggiators as additional modulation sources.
The 392 samples (wav/48 kHz/24 Bit/3.68 GB) are divided into 14 sub-folders, besides sampled acoustic instruments (dry and processed), chromatic percussion, membranophones and orchestral sections (borrowed from Iconica for HALion) Polarities also contains field recordings, foley samples, electronic sound effects, vocal samples, plenty of electronic sounds and dozens of long soundscapes and drones (1+ minute long).

Product page.

All my audio demos are below:

https://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/ ... -padshop-2

and here is a Youtube playlist with 17 videos, also containing two walkthroughs, one of them with voiceover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgOjJzv ... JDPBirLUZw
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I also wrote a very detailed patch-list with descriptions and modulation assignments for each patch, the PDF comes with the download I was told.

[firepile]

Finally.

[Sampleconstruct]

Finally.

Exactly my thoughts

[emasters]

Very nice, Simon - congrats!

[Sampleconstruct]

Very nice, Simon - congrats!

Thanks Ed

[aMUSEd]

Been waiting for this

[Sampleconstruct]

Been waiting for this

Release was originally planned for late April, then the pandemic kicked in which changed their schedule. The sounds didn't get outdated in those extra months though.

[aMUSEd]

These are really great but I do wish Steinberg would implement some sort of caching for the spectral analysis files or whatever is created every time it analyses a sample because at the moment it has to do that every time it loads a patch and if the file is big that takes few seconds. Alchemy used to do that.

[aMUSEd]

btw Steelfactory Acc drone is clicky for me on the attack phase

[Sampleconstruct]

These are really great but I do wish Steinberg would implement some sort of caching for the spectral analysis files or whatever is created every time it analyses a sample because at the moment it has to do that every time it loads a patch and if the file is big that takes few seconds. Alchemy used to do that.

Well it's real time synthesis so the spectral analysis has to be conducted every time you load a patch and with long samples that takes a while, it also depends on the CPU of your computer of course. As far as I understood this process can't be optimized any further, they already improved it during Beta and in the latest update.