Experimental Sounds & Samples
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The American West
This pack explores the sounds of the American's most iconic and natural geography, including the big walls and waterfalls of Yosemite, as well as an abandoned mine in the most remote mountain range in the United States, the Deep Creek Range in Utah. With recordings of open space echoes off thousand foot rocks, massive hollow tree thumps, bird sounds, natural tunnel reverb inside an abandoned mine, and gushing waterfalls, this pack is a deep exploration of the geology, ambiences, and rhythms of the west.
Plant Music & Granular Performances
A bridge between nature and musician is explored by Imka (Evidence of Yesterday) using MIDISprout technology and granular synthesis to capture and sonify the biodata of plants in this collection of micro-compositions unlike any other. A collaboration on equal grounds, plants are as much the composer as Imka in this array of live ambient performances, captured with the use case of MPC-style sampling close in mind. Within Plant Music & Granular Performances, you’ll hear sounds processed through VHS tapes, space echo, analog reverb, and guitar pedal oddities for atmospheric warmth. Incoming signals from plants are massaged with custom Max For Live devices, patched by Imka himself. Long-form samples allow producers to interpret multi-section passages with a selective ear, while shorter loops cut to bar offer an approachable sampling experience with room for interpretation. Imka encourages these worlds of sound be slowed down, sped up, and rearranged to taste. Plant Music & Generative Performances is as imaginative as it is carefully crafted––truly a must-have for seekers of sounds previously unheard and forward-thinking.
Iceland
As a special Explores project to recognize Earth Day, Charles Van Kirk & Splice's Josh Robertson visited Iceland's Vatnajökull Glacier and National Park, the largest glacier in Europe. Our intention is to create a sonic tribute to this incredible formation of ice. There is a sense of urgency to record these sounds before the well-documented recession of glaciers continues further as a result of climate change. A variety of microphones were used, including a 5.1 channel surround mic, and pressure sensitive mics (placed directly on the ice) to capture tonal and percussive sounds. We treated pieces of ice as percussion instruments playing them with hands, mallets and other implements. The natural sounds of the glacier were also captured - creaks and groans, massive ice serac collapses, glacial melting and runoff, and massive echoes. Charlie used the recordings as a springboard for sound design and manipulation upon returning to New York, using Sensory Percussion developed by Sunhouse to play the sounds of the ice. NOTE: Please refer to the documentation for your DAW to confirm it supports multichannel WAV files before downloading the "5.1 Surround Bonus Sounds."
Field Notes, a Holly Waxwing moment
Holly Waxwing is a sound designer and composer based in Providence, RI. Holly’s latest project, ‘The New Pastoral’, is “…a painterly polyptych that stands apart from its contemporaries not only on merit of its sound, but also the strength and sincerity of its unifying theme and the dichotomy of pastoralism with the ultra-slick, commercial-skewing sound that PC Music is better known for,” writes Urvogel. Holly runs the sound design agency We Time Audio House and co-curated Noumenal Loom Records for the past 10 years. In addition, Holly is a regular contributor to citizen science efforts in the field of mycology. Holly’s haptic approach to sound is heavily informed by their ASD/SPD and sound has always had a synesthetic layer for them. We caught up with Holly on a walk through a tidal marsh to learn a bit more about the hi-fi nostalgia and synthesized super-nature that make up his pack. “Field Notes is a sonic distillation of 5 years of notes taken on Planet Terr in the Virgo Supercluster. There was a remarkable similarity between some of the flora, fauna, fungi and even topography found on Terr and on Earth. Until the dust settles on the phylogenetics of Terr, I’ve used adjacent English common names and Latin wherever possible for clarity. I had the most success implementing Wavetable and FM modalities when transcribing my notes, and I can only hope that they will prove as helpful to you as they have to me. Special thanks to OrangeTone for making my field notes more legible and to OT & Estle for the first study into their broader implications.”
Recycling
In association with MusicRecycle, Dhruv Goel presents a sample pack inspired by recycling. Recorded by Goel, Kaushlesh ‘Garry’ Purohit, and Splice’s Josh Robertson at a recycling yard in downtown Los Angeles, the pack features an eclectic mix of sounds originating from metal, plastic, and rubber sources. Dig into genre-bending loops and one-shots with sounds created using trash cans, broken cars, discarded PlayStations, rubber tires, and other items people deemed as waste that we saw as instruments.
Antidrum 4
Antidrum 4 is the ultimate collection of alternative instruments, experimental percussive sounds, toys, junk, machines, tools, and objects and all kinds of other uniquely musical and acoustically interesting sonic sources. This vibrant palette of musical inspiration contains a vast collection of "found-sounds", field recordings, prepared objects, surfaces, children’s toys and instruments, booming bass to tight clicks, clacks, zips, zings, ticks and tocks. Antidrum 4 includes a vast new volume of toys, instruments and sound sources like plastic drums, gamelan, glockenspiel, claves and more. All of the sample content is included as standard open PCM wav files to allow you easy access to manipulate, reprogram and customize the sounds however you wish. This library was recorded in a number of different indoor and outdoor environments, out in the elements and often in uncontrolled conditions. You may hear ambient noises, such as wind, wildlife, creaks, thuds, cracks and room tone in the background in some samples, depending on the recording location and subject matter being recorded. Our goal is to preserve and accentuate the natural human qualities in our instruments without overly sterilizing the recordings. Contents: • Abacus – Clicks, shakes, and spins. • Air Raid Siren – Gear grinds, gear percussion, tuned siren. • Alligator Pull Toy – Clicks, drags, shakes. • Typewriter – Typing SFX. • Baoding Balls – Strikes, sustains, clacks, and slaps. • Bellwheel – Spins, mallets, and sustains. • Bells – Bike bell and desk bell ding and glissando. • Claves – taps and clicks. • Desk Drums – Big and small impacts with mallets, plastic and wooden sticks. • Foot Pump – Pumps up and down. • Galaxy Toy – Soft, hard, and metal mallets, roll sustains. • Jingles – Shakes and taps. • Liquid Triangle – hands, soft, hard, and metal mallets, sloshes, sustains. • Marble Spinner – Shakes and spins. • Metallophone – 3 notes: G6, D7, F7. • Metronome – clicks in 9 velocities. • Pan Whistle – Staccatos • Pin Toy – Flips up and down, sustains. • Pink Robot – Body clicks and twists. • Plastic Glockenspiel – ringing notes. • Plastic Cycle – Clicks and spins. • Pool Cannon – Long and short farts. • Push Popper – Pops. • Rubber Squeak Toy – Squeaks. • Star Wand – Strike metal, wood, wobble, and swoosh. • Tiny Tambourine – Shakes, taps, sustains. • Toy Drums – Hi-hat, kick, snare, tom. • Toy Gamelan – Gliss down, up, and strikes. • Toy Pan – hits and impacts. • Toy Phone – Hang up, spin up and down, sustains. • Washboard – Wash down, up, and tap. • Frog Block – taps and clicks.
scripts to Earth / hymns to Sky, a cutspace moment
At the forefront of a burgeoning underground scene of producers pushing the sonic limits of trap and plugg closer to ambient music, cutspace weaves IDM, glitch and post-rock influences into his work with artists such as xang, Moh Baretta, kuru, and emotionals. He describes his sound design as a process akin to masonry or engineering, where materials are processed to construct the appropriate environment and space. Inspired by ancient civilizations, esoterica, and alchemy, he crafts mystical sonic landscapes for vocal artists to inhabit. Descended from Syrian diaspora, cutspace describes his atmospheric world-building as an effort in some way to reconstruct a connection to the feeling of home. ‘scripts to Earth / hymns to Sky’ is a self-contained world of frequency extremes, whispered percussion, and nearly infinite ambience. At once history and sci-fi, textural etchings and painterly melodies drape the edges of the stereo field, created using custom FL patchers which he’s known to share with the community. When asked if he had any tips for upcoming producers, he replied succinctly with: (missing character)(missing character)
Sticks N' Stones
Spring has sprung in the Western Hemisphere and we’re back outside capturing nature’s unfoldings as the temperatures rise once again. The Splice Originals team captured an extensive set of percussive nature sounds made with sticks and stones we found along a trail in rural Tennessee. Then we mined the archives for previously unheard field recordings from the forests and seasides of Northern California. To complement these sounds, we crafted a set of Astra presets, Beatmaker patches, and melodic loops using electric guitar, a Wurlitzer, and a electric piano to inspire all of your late spring musings and sonic adventures. The result is a collection of spring field recordings mixed with modern sound design to offer you a truly unique bouquet of samples for your next production. Beatmaker is a sequencer plugin that works with any DAW and allows you to create beats without the need for complex drum programming. Astra is Splice’s new, versatile software synthesizer and sound design tool that enables you to come up with a wide range of unique tones as quickly and intuitively as possible.
Cello Distortions
Approaching her instrument as a tool for sound design as much as a compositional element in the traditional sense, Guatemalan artist Mabe Fratti forces listeners to reconsider their preconceived notions of the cello and the kinds of sounds it can make. Throughout Cello Distortions, Fratti explores the myriad dimensions of the cello’s tonal palette in all its physicality––staccato strokes, ricocheted bowing, tremolo harmonics––while embracing all manners of post-processing from overdrive to pitch-shifted reverb.Cello Distortions was recorded in Mexico City at Pedro Y El Lobo studios and produced by Santiago Parra, Joaquin Garcia and Pablo Carvallo.
Metal Structures with Ian Chang
Saying Ian Chang is a drummer is like saying a unicorn is a horse. Sure, it’s accurate, but it’s not the whole story. A more apt assessment is that Chang is the percussionist evolved: part human, part machine. He uses a complex array of drum triggers to play and manipulate samples live, fusing real-world drums with abstracted sources so that they’re interacting and infecting each other. The juxtaposition of computer-manipulated sounds and the natural swing of Chang’s playing is striking. It gives his music a biomechanical quality that’s hard to pin down. It’s like free jazz, marching band cadences, breakcore, and a bucket drummer all built a beautiful, beat-driven baby. We met up with Ian at a metal shop and recorded him playing not-so-rudimentary rudiments and polyrhythms on anything he could find. He hit scrap metal, pipes, and machines that sounded strange. We recorded his performance on a Zoom HR4 with a Sennheiser K6 with an ME66 shotgun microphone and ME64 cardioid modules, where appropriate. We processed the sounds, sliced them into loops and one-shots, then turned the most melodic lines into a scripted Kontakt instrument (which we’ve included in the pack) and made even more loops and presets from that. Metal Structures is a beat maker’s bonanza. Its sounds are as equally at home in cinematic scores as they are in trap, lo-fi, or IDM.
DUST AND ASH
Faint glowing signals from long-since abandoned devices course through landscapes ranging from smoldering craters, icy wastes, and barren deserts resulting in DUST AND ASH. Drawing inspiration from equal parts sci-fi landscapes and decay in the modern era, DUST AND ASH was designed with a sense of place in mind. Whether you’re looking to add a foreboding and cinematic presence to a current project, or need inspiration for your next emotional banger. Shades of multiple music genres can be found within this pack ranging from dubstep, downtempo synthwave, garage, drum & bass, and various other beats. DUST AND ASH pulls no punches and provides the raw, gritty sound to amp up productions and provide them an otherworldly quality.
Water
Get wet with this extensive collection of drips, splashes, plunges, and pours. We recorded this Splice Originals session in the studio and in the field. With a stereo hydrophone and an XY pair of Beyerdynamic MC930s, we meticulously captured countless permutations of water sounds in containers of varying sizes and materials. We then ventured outdoors with our field recorder and hydrophone to capture more plunges and splashes in a swimming pool, as well as ambiences of rain, creek, river, and sea.Using these sounds, we constructed a set of Beatmaker kits to get you up and running quickly in your sessions. We also included a set of Astra presets to complement your productions with one-shot chords, notes, and audio + MIDI loops inspired by French impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel, Japanese environmental composer Hiroshi Yoshimura, avant-garde composer William Basinski, and '90s R&B artists SWV and TLC. We hope you’ll use these sounds to expand the palette of your drum kit, create accent FX, or compose a score for those deep underwater dreams.
Melodic Meditations
Producer and guitarist Michael Hewett has created a gorgeous palette of custom loops and samples from his 25-year plus practice of nylon/steel string guitars & charango. Michael focused on capturing the intimate sound of the nail contacting the strings, ethereal ebow sheets of sound, enchanting charango passages & danceable stems influenced by the music of Mexico, South and Central America.
Antidrum 3: Experimental Percussion & Effects
Antidrum 3 is a mighty compendium of experimental multi-sampled percussion, melodic sustaining and special effects instruments, created from a vast catalogue of field recordings, found sounds, prepared objects, unique surfaces and noisy contraptions. It’s an extraordinarily powerful toolbox of musical paint, spanning a full spectrum with everything from rich bass tones and boomers to tight clicks, clacks, clangs, thuds, zings, clanks, pings, bangs and zips. But don’t let the name fool you — Antidrum 3 covers much more than just percussive content. We’ve captured electronics, tonally resonant surfaces, alarms, appliances, electric toothbrushes, elevators, cattle, giant plate glass windows and all manner of other things to get some awesome melody-making sonic flavors as well. We captured each of these sounds over a 3-year period throughout our many travels around California and Texas, picking up everything from the mundane yet startlingly musical things you’d find around the house to unique one-of-a-kind sounds we discovered out in the field. Open your mind and this library can take you anywhere you want to go. All of the sample content is included as standard open PCM wav files to allow you easy access to manipulate, reprogram and customize the sounds however you wish. This library was recorded in a number of different indoor and outdoor environments, out in the elements and often in uncontrolled conditions. You may hear ambient noises, such as wind, wildlife, creaks, thuds, cracks and room tone in the background in some samples, depending on the recording location and subject matter being recorded. Our goal is to preserve and accentuate the natural human qualities in our instruments without overly sterilizing the recordings.
Spatial Audio
There’s no doubt that virtual reality could be the future of music. We’re seeing that now more than ever. But did you know that sound itself has its own virtual worlds to explore? The Splice Explores team collaborated with composer, producer, and sound designer, Jonathan Rowden to go where few sample packs have gone before: into the pioneering, bleeding edge of spatial audio. Encompassing a small myriad of formats, spatial audio is best known for its 3-dimensional realism, which is essential to virtual experiences by using ambisonics (360-degree immersive sound fields) and binaural audio (a simulation of your own head in those fields). But what would it look like to make music in the virtual realm for the everyday? We’ve taken the idea of virtual worlds as the impetus for creative action. Using mostly modular synthesis and field recordings, we’ve curated a library of rich, organic spatial environments, one-shots, loops, and beats that will inspire you to explore immersive sound-making for yourself. The natural field recordings were captured by an MH Acoustics Eigenmike em32 ambisonics microphone and decoded to 16-channel ambisonics, included in this pack. NOTE: Refer to the documentation in your DAW to ensure you can play back files marked "ambisonic."
The Himalayas
Renowned experimental percussionist, Susie Ibarra traveled to the Himalayas in Sikkim, India to capture water percussion with hydro-phonic microphones, as well as bamboo one-shots, layered loops, various animal sounds, and textures from the region. She captured the water rhythms of glacial runoff in streams, waterfalls, and rivers, then added ambient omnidirectional recordings of the environment including bell sounds and distant chants from the Rumtek Monastery and bamboo recordings along the mountains of Gangtok.
Polyrhythmic Palettes with Tristan Arp
Exploring polyrhythmic expressions and syncopated patterns, multimedia artist Tristan Arp presents a genre-bending sound palette of live bamboo mallets and analog percussion, synthesized and played by hand using a Nord Drum 3P and Moog Subsequent 37. Expanding on the conventional offering of samples, the experimental producer demonstrates the compositional structures of polyrhythms and their interplay in an Ableton template, complete with custom virtual instruments, Ableton presets, and MIDI arrangements. All sounds designed from scratch, performed, recorded, and edited by Tristan Arp.
Forest Percussion
Starting from a foundation of field recordings and struck materials from various woods in and around Bristol, Ben Tregaskes (aka Lurka) exaggerated these natural timbres, processing them into hyperreal forms. Dry, close mic'd elements are layered with ambiences which are then sequenced in a music concrete style. Gated ambiences are layered to provide rhythm and atmosphere to the loops.Drastic normalization was used in some instances to put a microscope to the hidden sounds and scale to them human perception. Many of the strangest timbres in this collection were discovered this way, giving us a glimpse into worlds previously unheard.
South India
Field recorders in hand, musicians, producers, and sound artists Krishna Jhaveri and Sanaya Ardeshir (aka Sandunes) spent 30 days traveling through South India to capture the land’s sounds. From South Goa through Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, they drove through farms, plantations, and forests in search of sonic signatures of the remaining wild spaces they could access. Through this expedition, they stumbled upon a collection of soundscapes bursting with life—mating rituals, alarm calls, and circadian rhythms of a plethora of Indian species in their natural habitats. The result was this inspiring set of audible rhythms, melodies, and textures—all markers of the thriving biodiversity of the region. Jhaveri and Ardeshir also teamed up with music producer, Parimal Shais who documents and samples traditional South Indian instruments. Shais recorded a variety of traditional horns, drums, percussion, strings, and voice to capture and represent the human element amidst the naturally occurring sounds in this pack. This collection is intended to serve as a way to connect with the nature that is thriving and start a conversation about the environment and hopefully inspire climate action.
Future Folk
half.cool is back with a new sample pack for Sonic Collective exploring the glitchy cross-sections of folk and electroacoustic experimentation. Future Folk is comprised of banjo, acoustic guitars, repurposed vintage Mellotron, wobbly glockenspiel, and a variety of unique textures. The inspiration for this sonic exploration came from alternative/indie and contemporary folk artists such as Jessica Pratt, The Books, Bibio, & Bon Iver. These sounds are recommended for any producer or songwriter interested in a contemporary sound palette steeped in acoustic origins.
Artifact Percussion
Going beyond a traditional “found sound” pack, Artifact Percussion digs deep into the hidden sonic fragments in percussion instruments. The textures unearthed by ZONE Drums and 92elm offer unique grooves & tones that will awaken your productions. Sizzles, buzzes, rumbles, scrapes, sympathetic resonances, and other auditory accidents are often overlooked or intentionally avoided - but when revealed and polished, these sounds can shine like rare gems. Inside you'll find 200 loops & one shots with some of the most unique tones, rhythms, and ear catching audio that fit into any style, ranging from technical electronic production to earthly textures.
BlankFor.ms: Tape Age Sample Pack
BlankFor.ms uses degraded tapes and analog synthesizers to create sounds meant more for the body than the mind. Evocative, dynamic, and rich, these sounds will add unique texture to productions of any genre.
Lofi Scifi with Adam Schatz
Lo-fi Sci-fi with Adam Schatz harkens back to the early days of synthesizers and 1960s-1970s sci-fi jazz with the use of tenor sax, organs, bass clarinet, electric bass, drum machines, synthesizers such as Neon Egg's Planetarium, Moog Sub 37, and many more instruments—all passed through tape machines. This experimental pack explores what it looks like to put a slightly modern twist on the avant-garde music of the 1960s. Adam Schatz is a songwriter, improviser, and producer from Newton, Massachusetts. He moved to New York to study the saxophone, where he formed the collaborative improvising band, Father Figures, and adventurous rock band, Landlady. Schatz treats all of his projects as an adventure, observing the world with fresh, almost alien eyes. From his studio, The Chamber of Commerce, he has produced recordings for artists such as Renata Zeiguer, Danke, Isaac Gillespie, and more. We hope you use the sounds in this pack to break your boundaries and try new paths. That it pushes you out of your comfort zone into uncharted territories.
Russian Dolls: Sunhouse Percussion
To see a Sunhouse Sensory Percussion kit in action is pretty remarkable. To see Ian Chang play one is nothing short of mesmerizing. For his third Splice Originals pack, Chang chopped and screwed the sounds created for his first two acoustic packs—Obtuse Rhythms and Metal Structures—and put them onto an electronic kit. Using Sunhouse's Sensory Percussion, he recontextualized them to create something new. This pack features loops that bounce, versatile textures, a wide range of melodies, a ton of one-shots prepped and primed for modern productions, and a whole lot more.
Noise
Noise is all around us, both natural and human made. While noise is defined as "unwanted, or unpleasant", it is in fact an integral component of sound design and composition. Drum, percussion, and even melodic sounds can be synthesized and sculpted using various noise profiles as a starting point, and producers often use tape hiss, vinyl crackle, and other noise to add depth to their compositions. Noise includes all types of broad frequency "disturbances", such as crackles, pops, hisses, hums, and tones. This pack explores noise both generated from analogue synthesizers and sampled from the real world. In addition to being presented in raw form ready for manipulation, these natural and synthesized noises have been filtered and edited into drums, one-shots, sound fx, and melodic elements ready to add interesting depth to your production.
Polymorphic Perc
Rubicon label manager Tristan Arp offers up a serving of fractal percussion and swerving textures, created with modular synthesis. Feeding euclidean rhythms and generative patterns into the physical modelling module Plonk, Arp shifts voices mid-phrase for a polymorphic effect. Real-time dub echo throws and spring reverb splashes add dimension to the slippery assortment, pitched and atonal. Utilising a simplistic modular setup, Polymorphic Perc demonstrates the possibilities of just a few modules working together in curious conjunction.
Home Hardware with Machinedrum
Machinedrum experiments with the groundbreaking and club-shaking “physical” drum machine called the Perc Pro and common items from a Home Depot. The result is an eclectic collection of loops and one-shots that make things like tubing, guttering, roof jacks, metal studs, metal sheets, greek tiles, wood planks and fence posts into a collection of miscellaneous percussion and oil-stained kicks.