Cyclick Samples - Sounds Of The City [WAV | NKI] -Sin

Tired of the same old drum hits? Well, there's a world of noise out there just waiting to be captured, edited
down and turned into rhythms, hits, effects, etc. For this trip outside the studio I packed a portable recorder
into my backpack with the mic (and foam wind breaker) poking out the top and then cycled into town (in this
case, Bristol), parked up, walked around looking for noises, and then moved on to the next place. A couple
of hours of raw mono audio was then loaded into iZotope's RX3 for editing. 99% of the sound is the general
hum of the city, but in amongst the traffic, chatter and mall-music more distinct, even percussive, sounds can
be picked out. Using the DeNoise function in RX3, along with the Photoshop like spectral selection tools
these buried sounds were pulled out and collated into two sets (from two recordings). Most of the hits come
from a building site, but the deeper sounds, which I have used for kick drum patterns, come from motorbikes
that pulled up/took off from lights whilst on my bike. There is the obligatory siren in raw form and edited out
from the background noise. I was expecting to capture more sirens on this particular day, as there always
seems to be one close by in Bristol, but of course I only managed to record this one – I even walked around
police and fire stations in the hope of more, but alas, nothing.

The collated raw hits, which are included in this set, were then dropped into Kontakt and processed within
the sampler as well as fed through chains of plugins. The key is to be heavy handed with the amplitude
envelope controls, creating and enhancing transients in sounds that have limited dynamics. Countering this
with compression/limiting as well as distortion can really shape juicy, high impact hits, but with a tone that
you can't get with acoustic or synthesised drums.

The two sets of hits were treated in three different ways to produce six distinct kits, along with associated
beat loops across six tempos (90, 100, 110, 120, 130 and 170 bpm). The hits and loops have been collated
into Kontakt instruments (see below).

Of course, the hits don't have to be used as drums; their distinct tonal characters make them excellent
starting points for big reverbed out FX hits, and dubby delays will also produce rich textures. Remember to
go heavy on the pitch modulation too – these sounds can take a whole load of mangling as they don't sound
like an instrument and so altering them sounds less odd to the human ear than, for instance, pitching a piano
note or a voice.

The Kontakt instruments (created in version 5) for both the beat loops and hit kits are arranged chromatically
from C1 and up. They aren't laid out like a drum kit as the hits are hard to classify in that way, so just poke
around and see what you get. It can be fun to split a MIDI beat to a real drum kit and one of these 'found
sound' kits to add a semi-random textural backing. A ladder LPF is assigned to CC74 and CC01 (Mod
Wheel) controls an HPF in the instruments. The hits are also assigned to separate groups per process within
the instruments