128_Jackhammer

Introducing 32 Bar And Grill!

128_Jackhammer is a collection of loops—Airwindows style. You can find an example of what I can do with these loops here. They’re ten bucks, not fifty like the Audio Units, and they don’t get updates, I just won’t repeat any of the files ever.

Why buy loops from Airwindows of all places? Because they’re special. I don’t mean that they are hardware synths run into an API 3124+ preamplifier (transformer balanced outputs!) run hot into a heavily padded Apogee Rosetta converter, even though that’s exactly what they are.

I don’t mean that they are original captures, totally fresh, not recopied among sample sets and reprocessed into a thin gray paste. Even though they ARE totally fresh captures through that hot analog rig.

What I mean is, these things are either live playing (drums captured through primitive two-channel miking, bass DIed through a custom box I wired up myself to give more aggressive tones), or they’re hardware synths sequenced… BY hardware. This is like old school grooves. They’re being driven off an old Kawai Q80 hardware sequencer. It’s often said that modern DAWs don’t groove like the old sequencer boxes and Ataris and such. This is true. The hardware doesn’t spend even one cycle thinking about hard drive handling, or running a screen, or powering the audio outputs. It does nothing but tick over the MIDI information, that’s all.

So, when you capture a minute of that at 48K (for a bit more air at a rate that’s video-friendly) you get a chunk of hardware groove. Then, in your DAW, you take that 32 bars and you loop it. The loop points are where you can do new things or throw in drops or breakdowns, and even if the DAW wavers a bit at those points it won’t matter because they’re transitions.

The live tracks aren’t going to be played like the greatest studio musicians are Daft Punking it up just for you. It’s all just me. But, I know for a fact there are 1-bar, 2-bar, 4-bar loops in there that’ll work, and rather than being sampled off an old record it’s multitracks. What’s there is there but if you know your sample chopping, you’ll be able to think of things to do, and you’ll be able to manufacture rock-hard beats on top of the machine-powered 32 bar kicks and sequences. You can gate stuff based on the A-flat psy bass. There’s a lot of stuff to do and it can sound as much or as little like the source tracks as you wish. There’s three different Kawai K4 pads, an Alpha Juno pad, the Yamaha FB-01 psy-bass, two live drum tracks… $10 for what’s there, as it is. Maybe you’ll ignore the Jomox kick, and loop my drum track real tight. Maybe you’ll trigger bass notes off MIDI and turn it into a virtual instrument, grabbing stray notes until you can play entirely unrelated melodies. These are all fresh tracks, raw original captures.

I have no idea if this is going to work. This world is different to me and it often seems like the products out there are pretty lame and recycled. EDM needed a new source of original sound. Jackhammer’s in A flat, and the filenames start with 128 because I foresee doing more of these, until there’s a big pile of files you can grab elements from. Beat comes first, you can always juxtapose stuff in different keys for effect. But I don’t need to tell you this, right? You know what this is. Try it.