Jbox Industrial Sampler

I had a sampling session with one of my peers at SAE, Morgan, and we basically took a Zoom H4N around West End and sampled a bunch of things. The main elements we captured is the pulsing sound that the lights make at a pedestrian crossing, and a close up Morgan's car engine starting. There was a lot of other cool things we tried to get whilst walking around however there was a lot of noise present, cars and road-works everywhere - which made it much more difficult. The car engine is my favourite, it took a couple of recordings to get it how we wanted. Popping the bonnet and getting the Zoom as close as we could to the source in order to get that proximity effect working with the growl of the engine.

When we first got the idea and started experimenting with it, it reminded me of this Tracques song on Boysnoize Records:

After walking around a few blocks recording, we took it back to the fire-escape stairwell inside campus and took advantage of the massive natural reverb created from claps and when doors are slammed. Here is a link to an Ableton session I've created with a really cool sampler ready to play on your MIDI keyboard.

The instrument rack is a combination of the pedestrian lights and the car engine transposed across an octave and then using the 'distribute ranges around root key' feature to fill in the rest of the piano roll. You'll find when you hit the keys softer or harder on your controller, the two sound sources will crossfade into each other creating some pretty cool layering effects. I set up a sound selector macro in the rack as well but it didn't end up getting used since the velocity-fading idea sounded a lot cooler.

This means though that you can download and add to this sample patch, choose which sounds you want to be on which selection chain, and control the whole instrument via your controller! Also if you want some ideas of where to head with the samples, I made an industrial-electro arrangement in the session too - definitely inspired by those BNR/French Electro vibes.

Finally, if you'd like to learn how to use multisamples and create your own sampler instrument, below is a great tutorial:

Enjoy!