Nothing major of course as I don’t like to upset any of you but sometimes things can be done quicker in this world of continual improvement we live in. The changes and additions to the network are below:

MrTheBigBlog

I like to write about what I am up to for a few reasons but I believe this site isn’t the best place for my rants so I have set up a new blog so I can have my chance to tell you about my studio days, my life and also my work in general.

It is one of the best purifying moments of my day writing down all of the things I have been up to and even if no one reads it, I still feel a lot better for it.

MrTheBigBlog

Multiples

Okay, so I will be putting everything out as MrTheBigMan from now on so I will slowly phaze out the Multiples brand.

Now, I will still be supplying you all with the best premium samples for free but I will also be cutting down the amount of releases this year in order to work on my own music. One of the reasons I give away so much here is order for people to visit and check out my music so if you do use the samples at least listen to a few tracks whilst you are hear and let me know what you think of them.

My plans are to release 4 more packs this year out side of 2 or 3 records so keep your eyes on twitter for more information as I tend to update it more often than most.

The packs names will change as I will be offering them in small, medium, large and extra large. This is dependant on the amount of content as follows:

1. 0-100mb = Small
2. 100-300mb = Medium
3. 300-500mb – Large
4. 500mb+ – XL

You will notice they have already been changed on the website.

And thats it….for the time being.

I get bored easily you see so expect some radical changes over the next year. Also, look out for Miniman, my next record coming as soon as I can write it.

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After wetting everyones appetite with the loops given away for free in E|Drums Mini Vol 2, I decided to start getting some new sounds together to use in my next set of records as well as in my next set of sample downloads.

I received quite a lot of things over the Christmas period that quite frankly, can be beaten with a stick.

As the drum sampler ‘Massive ‘ has 6 different slots  I have split them up into 6 different areas:

1. Kicks – made from software plugins and run through focusrite pre-s before being effected by Kongs transient designer and then put through Guitar Rig
2. Snares – created using Micritonic controlled live. Again treated with Kongs compressor and transient .
3. High Toms – Again made with Microtonic
4. Low Toms – Created in the same way as the High ones but they have had most of the high end shelved off so they provide the bass end of the spectrum.
5. Low Toms Effected – all toms sounds run through the Guitar rig to create several variations on the samples
6. Found Sounds – Every single thing I could find in the house smacked with drum sticks in order to give the most unique sounds as possible.

Due to the organic nature of Massive, all of the sounds are modulated inside the drum machine so look out for the following:

1. Just because the download says ‘Hats & Toms’, don’t think for second that they will all sounds like they are supposed to.
2. All sounds are left with their dynamics untouched. I have not used any effects in creating these sounds so you are free to do so yourself.
3. All loops are rhythmic but also quite a lot of them are melodic as well

Tech Specs:

Full Mix Loops – 86 loops recorded at 120bpm – 219.5mb

Kick & Snare – 144 loops recorded at 120bpm – 196.6mb

Hats & Toms – 137 loops recorded at 120bpm – 213.3mb

Tom FX & Found Sounds – 90 loops recorded at 120bpm – 158.1mb

Total – 457 loops @ 787.5mb

Download

Full Loops

Kick & Snare

Hats & Toms

Tom FX & Found Sounds

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I am very happy to announce that the first release of 2012 is now ready to download from Bandcamp.

The record is made up of four tracks plus a bonus remix by Noodrem of  The Germs.

• The Germs
• The Future of Mankind
• My Body
• Jigsaw (2)
• The Germs – Noodrem Remix

Listen

Download

The release can be downloaded in one of the following ways:

1. You can download it on a ‘Pay as You Like’ basis from Bandcamp. It starts at 20p per track or £1.00 for the full release..

2. You can get the album for free by tweeting about it using the button below or by using the advertisement at the right hand side of the blog. It adds a tweet to your timeline and then takes you to the download.

Making of: “The Germs”

I have been working under the moniker T2D for a very long time and although I loved the output I was always working between different aliases when creating music. T2D was generally my Minimal and Tech House guise with MrTheBigMan as a more bouncy, break-beat orientated style.

After the 2011 being about the T2D album and also the year in which Multiples really took shape, I decided to close MTBM.NET as it was then and just from that point focus on MrTheBigMan as a brand and offer music and samples under this brand instead of the 4 brands I had at the time.

As you can imagine this took alot of pressure off considering the demanding schedule of releases that this gave me and because of it, I was able to really get back to taking time over tracks rather than busting out 20 tracks a year.

The Germs is the culmination of that work and is my most satisfying release to date for exactly those reasons. It is a four track e.p. with a special bonus remix of The Germs by Noodrem. Below is a track by track breakdown (in order of when they were completed rather than record order) as to the motivation and the synth’s and programs used to create the tracks:

The Future of Mankind

I came up with the idea for this track when I was watching a production video from Future Music Magazine on Umek, a Slovenian electronic music producer and it was mostly about using delay to introduce different sections of the track, bouncing it down as you go and then chopping it up for lead ins and out.

So, I got a fairly straightforward sound (I believe is was a high pitched Bell or Tom) and then programmed a fairly straight midi file and then put Logics Delay Designer on top of it and then tried all of the presets and made some of my own, bouncing the audio as I went along. I then cut it all up and built the lead in’s with that. You can hear it in the first breakdown of the track.

The main synth line in the second breakdown came from the Prism synth in Reaktor (available in 5.6). I really like this synth as it gives bell like tones I haven’t heard in a long time. It was essentially played as a sequenced line across two octaves.

The main vocal samples can from a Crate Diggers sample pack and you can find more information on those guys further down this post.

The Germs

This was my first foray into using Reaktor for every aspect of the sound and track. The Massive Drum sequencer was the symth of choice here and I loaded samplemaps of all of the samples on E|Drums 2.0 into it and then mined over 300 loops for use in the track. Even the bassline came from a drum sounds through the synth.

The thing I love about Massive is that no matter what sound or timbre you throw at it, it spits out the most usable sounds and loops imaginable and you can really here that in the finished recording.

I got the vocal samples again from the Crate Diggers pack and the loops together with this gave it a theme of a track for a horror movie or old scifi movie.

The pads heard throughout were created with exactly that in mind in order to create that tension throughout the track as it builds up throughout.

This was also the first track I really felt I had got the build up to the final drop right, after lots of experimentation. I love how it filters and reverbs out before smacking you in the face when the beats and sounds come back in. This is the reason I make music.

My Body

This was built at 6am on a Saturday morning when I came downstairs with an idea to get the Bass Guitar out and noodle on it. I recorded several passes over the beat on the track (I had this already written but was taking my time in thinking of rhythm parts) and then comped the best parts together (I don’t claim to be any kind of ‘player’).

That gave me the basis for the track and I continued that day until the main melody line for the last break and intro was made.

Again, I used the Prism synth on this for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

The sample came in very easily as it fitted perfectly with the track but also the theme of the record as well.

Jigsaw (2)

As you will have seen throughout the site I have been working on this track for the last few months and really took shape one sunny afternoon in Spain on a laptop with Reason 4. I won’t go into the details here but the links for the creation can be found below:

The Making of Jigsaw (2)

Incidentally, this will be made available in the forthcoming release entitled ‘Jigsaw’ and it will be included with the third and fourth incarnation.

So, this was a labour of love which saw many different mixes across two countries to get it finished and I am very satisfied with the result.

Crate Diggers

As said previously in this post I used a samplepack from Crate Diggers to provide me with the vocal samples for this record. They came from ‘The Golden Age of Wireless’ pack and the details of it can be found below:

430+ extended phrases, statements, exclamations and questions captured directly from the golden era of radio broadcasting in this original, royalty-free spoken word treasure trove bristling vinyl-infused character.

Spanning female swoons to sci-fi statements and everything inbetween, this ultra-useable selection of dusty dialogues will suit house, chillout and hip hop producers searching for truly vintage vocal inspiration.

433 clips are offered in total, broken down into 12 sub-folders of Exclamations, Female Words, Love, Male Words, Musical References, On The Radio, On The Telephone, Questions, Science Fiction, Statements, Sultry Women and Tasks.

You can download it here.

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A|Bass Mini was created completely from scratch using the Subtractor, Malstrom and Thor synths in Reason which were then routed through the new effects on offer in Reason 6 including the Line 6 effects and the Pulveriser.

Two downloads are available, as below:

.WAV

5 fully multisampled bass sounds for you to use and abuse in your favourite sampler. All are the raw sounds from the effected patches created in Reason and equal a fairly simple 81mb download.

Download – A|Bass Mini Vol1 – WAV

Reason Refill

As all of the sounds were created in Reason it makes perfect sense for me to include not only the samples but also the combinator’s as well.

You will also find all of the synth patches along with all of the individual effects patches.

Weighing it at 31mb this pack also includes the samples themselves fully mapped for NN-19 and NN-XT.

Please be aware, this refill is available to Reason 6 users and above as it makes use of the new effects there in.

Download – A|Bass Mini Vol1 – Reason Refill

Listen

The track below is sequences of each of the bass sounds

Learn

The video below shows how I created one of the patches available in the download.

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In the download you will find the following:

Macros

• 4 Pole Filter
• 5 Waveform Oscillator (created in episode 3)
• ADSR Envelope
• Comb Filter
• Filter Matrix (created in episode 5)
• Note Pitch Macro
• Pro52 Filter (modified from original)

Ensemble

• The full Exploration Reaktor Synth

Download Reaktor Macros and Ensemble

For those that missed this post, you can read it here or watch the first video in the series which is below:

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In the continuation of the Padded Cell series, I have created 30 brand new drum loops and then slowed them down, put them through DevineSounds Graincube and then added effects from Guitar Rig 4.

The plan was to make the sounds as usable as possible whilst also giving cut up ability in order for you to extract sounds from each loop.

Tech Specs

30 different sounds @ 143mb

Download Padded Cell 4

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(artwork courtesy of Jiggery Pokery – www.jiggery-pokery.com )

I was initially underwhelmed by the program due to the fact it was created with a controller in mind which is something I didn’t have to hand at the time.

It was only when I started hooking things up to it and messing around with its insides I really learned of the power in which it provided and the resultant video series looks at 3 areas at which it does very well.

1. Using CV of ReDrum to control Kong

As I am used to sequencing in Reason and Kong itself has no onboard sequencer, I used the CV outputs of ReDrum to control the pads in Kong so I could add it into my workflow.

I also learned how to use Kong’s own CV outputs to control other pads, leading to me being able to layer different sounds using the same engine.

The video below goes into more detail on how I achieved this:

2. Drum Synthesis

This is the area I am most interested in as this is where the E|Drums series of samplepacks come from, drum synthesis. The video below shows how do achieve different sounds in Kong using the drum engines for Kick, Snare, Hats and Toms.

3. Nurse REX and using the effects Externally

Lastly, I wanted to understand how to take a REX loop and put it across all of the pads in order to pick out key sounds within the loop.

This isn’t as easy as it could have been to be honest and there is a lot of room for improvement in this area.

However, I do love the fact you can use the effects on external sources as some of the effects are excellent.

Below is a video that shows you how I achieved this:

I did enjoy getting to know Kong but as I said earlier there is a lot of room for improvement and I hope Propellerheads update it to make it easier to do some of the things we take for granted in machines such as Guru and Geist.

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Jigsaw is exactly what the first track was, a piecing together of simple arpeggiated patterns that later went on to be one of the most listened to tracks on Memoirs via Soundcloud.

If you have read the editorial on ‘An Introduction’, you will know I went to Spain on a writing trip and created the original arrangement of Jigsaw (2) in Reason 4.

I decided to show this track in its full glory and also how I put it together using the sounds just in the Reason soundbank that came with the program. The original track is broken down like this:

Sidechain Source

This was to run a sidechain trigger from a kick through all of the compressor devices in the rack. It is simply made up of 2 Spider Audio Splitters and a ReDrum playing a 4/4 kick pattern. The rack view and its routing can be seen below:

Drum Tracks

This was comprised of a simple Kick Drum, Clap and Open HiHat and was further added to by some sidechained loops that really brought the groove together. These were then sequenced in the main sequencer to flesh out a rough arrangement of the track itself.

Sequenced sounds

These were the bass and 303 tracks which were created using the sequencer in the Thor synth. I created some sounds and then mapped them to controllers on my Ozone keyboard and began playing with the sounds in order to get difference in each sound throughout the track. This was then resequenced live along with the drums until a happy medium was met with the drums.

The video and resultant audio track can be seen and heard below and these give you an idea of what I had started to work with when trying to create a finished track for the record.

Finished Sequencer Arrangement

Part 2

So I then bounced out all of the files into Logic and began to look at each of the tracks in turn to see if I would keep the sounds or get rid of them. I knew at this stage the Bass and 303 would stay so I bounced out different sequenced variations and cut them up in Logic.

The below video shows the result of what I did to get the track into a release ready download from start to finish.

The finished track will be a part of my next record release entitled ‘The Germs’ which will be available on the 1st of January 2012.

I plan to release a small EP called ‘Jigsaw’ and this will include some new tracks as well as some remixes of them as well and will be given away for free, somewhere around April of next year.

One of these tracks will also appear on Technoid, a new live show I am creating for the internet where I will be performing some of my new tracks and some remixes of old ones live over the interwebs. Again, this is slated for release around April/May of next year so stay tuned.

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Part 1

The first part of the series looks at hooking up a simple oscillator to the output and controlling it via the following Macros:

Note Pitch – This macro is used to allow a midi keyboard to be played and the resultant pitches to be heard coming out of the oscillator.

The pitch output is simply the pitch of the key transported to the oscillator which then plays the sound at that pitch

The video below shows how I did it.

Part 2

In this video I look at adding additional oscillators to the original piece and then using a macros to mix the signals together in order to get a much bigger sound.

Mixer Macro – this is used to create a small mixer to allow the additional of all of the oscillators and lets us control the volume of each oscillator to help us create new sounds.

The video below shows how I did it.

Part 3

This part looks at how to create macros by changing the original oscillator which has three waveforms into an oscillator that has five waveforms.

Seperator Macro – This is essentially a switch that allows us to choose which waveform will be outputted from the oscillator itself. We can change the amount of ports we have in order to get all five waveforms to choose from in the button menu.

The video below shows how I did it.

Part 4

In this instalment we add two filters to the overall synth and then create a drawable LFO to modulate the sounds coming from the oscillators.

The video below shows how I did it.

Part 5

The last part of the series looks at how we can use the seperator macro as a filter matrix by allowing the user to choose which oscillator goes into which filter. This is a fairly straightforward tutorial but shows the routing ability of Reaktor when creating patches.

Exploration : Reaktor – Samplepack

This was initially released as a pack to showcase some of the sounds made using the synth and can be downloaded below for free as always:

Download Exploration : Reaktor

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My plan is to release all of my tracks as written demos so that you can hear them as they were first written and then provide video showing how I made the tracks and went through the writing process.

From this point I will then create a video series on each track featured guiding you through all of the changes I have made in order to create a better sound for each of the tracks before releasing them as a part of a particular record.

The current demos available can be heard below:

NB: it should be noted that these are indeed demos and in no way are the finished releases. I have done this solely to document the production process only but of course you may have them for free as you see fit.

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