Crafting little beats

Orbeat has me hooked on making new beats, with its circular interface and some similarities to another favourite plugin of mine but this one is simpler, perhaps more accessible. I’ve hooked it up to OneShot the sampler and it works beautifully.In no time I got it up and running, started tweaking and the beat came to life, with probability and more to help humanise the beat - it’s highly performant.

This one was cooked up from an assortment of samples that I’ve crate-dug out of the ever increasing library that is Tracklib. The export tool has truncated it a little bit which is a shame but I can probably craft more out of it.

I’ve been adding these sounds to a collection for later curation on the Push and some more sophisticated beat crafting. I can also try them out in the iPad space, using Koala and other apps. Forever seeking creative ways of moving the material that I curate among the way.

That’s how I visualise this in my mind. A curative effort that encourages curiosity and experimentation. Sometimes mixing genres that don’t normally blend, can lead to surprising results. Give it a go!

Pond - is a new sequencer that is based on the physics of ripples and is a beautiful plugin to watch in action, the photo above doesn’t do it any justice whatsoever. It’s based on the concept of emitters that send out ripples and when encountering a coloured block, which are all different notes in the chosen scale, a note is played. Emitters can have their own note resolution, pattern length, so polyrhythms are possible and they can be channeled to multiple instruments for some deep performances.

I blended this one with some of the drums in the very first example at the top of this newsletter but only very quietly, giving you the impression that drums may come in fully but it’s an ambient piece, they serve only as a gentle heartbeat.