The prolific crew over at Sample Magic has brewed up some kind of spell that allows them to conjure loops of stellar quality while keeping them exceptionally affordable. They’ve just cast us a ton of new loop content for Studio One, covering everything from hip-hop’s Golden Era to today’s Festival Trap, and a few unexpected things in between like Organic Electronic. Click on any of the artwork to head over to shop.presonus.com and listen to audio demos!
Inspired by the groundbreaking hip hop scene of the late 80s and early 90s, Golden Era is an expansive 1.2GB collection of classic MPC beats and breaks, retro vinyl-styled loops, soul and jazz-infused melodics, afro-laced percussive grooves, analogue layers, 520+ dusty drum hits and 70+ stabs spanning Rhodes, Hammond, assorted analogue synths, live bass hits and electric guitar licks.
Inspired by the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Jurassic 5, Golden Era delivers six folders jam-packed with old school beats and breaks, mellow live bass, fat analogue subs, retro synths, soulful keys, live percussion grooves, characterful FX layers and more.
All loops are tempo-synced at either 80, 90 or 100bpm and loops are key-labeled where applicable.
Monstrous, moody, monolithic: Raw Techno delivers stacks of uncompromising analogue-derived sounds that are authentically rooted in the monochrome Berlin aesthetic. Packed with pummelling 909-led grooves, raw 303 lines, industrial synths drones, menacing bass tones, dark dub chords and 300+ high-grade drum hits and kits, Raw Techno distils the best of this singular sound into one essential collection.
The collection contains tempo-synced loops at 125, 127, 132 and 135bpm. All loops are key-labeled where applicable for total convenience.
Epic textures, lo-fi beats and melancholy kissed grooves with a modern twist. Ambient House is equal parts melodic chill and driving tech-house in a sound that’s swept Balearic climates and clubs across the nation. Atmospheric chords and introspective arpeggios from rich analogue sources, tape saturated beat-constructions and classic mono synths.
Brimming with choice, this contemporary collection contains over 1.2GB of evolving poly-synths, skippy hats, organic live percussion, sizzling sequences, laid-back pads, thundering beats and upper, downer, all-arounder FX served in pristine 24-bit Wav with MIDI where appropriate. Flexibility is the name of the game with 4 x exclusive drum kits and 4 x multi-sampled analogue synths (Roland Juno 60, Korg MS-20, Korg Volca) included.
From the best-selling producer of Future Electronica comes ‘Future Soul’ a fusion of maximalist beats, epic evolving melodics and hook-laden vocal chops. Positioned at the intersection of LA Beat, Future R&B and Neo-Soul this 1.4GB+ collection takes its cues from hardcore-digital production as well as vintage funk and soul vibes to devastating effect.
Inspired by the multi-faceted sounds of Snakehips, Jack U and Kaytranada no stone has been left unturned in providing the most-authethenic analogue and digital loops, samples, patches and MIDI available today. Key and tempo-labelled at 90 BPM expect full-track inspiration loops, rich astral pads, fat layered hits, syncopated trap grooves and much more.
Euphoric, in-your-face and hard hitting, Festival Trap is 100% guaranteed to get your production blazing dancefloors. Jammed with sub blasting grooves, hyper leads, glo-fi melodic synths and cone-rupturing 808 boom, Festival Trap offers up the best of classic dirty south grooves, combining elements of electronica and future pop. Inspiration assured for your next main-room smash.
Dive into 1.2GB+ full-track inspiration and music loops ready baked, chopped and mangled to perfection. Choc-filled with full fat drum fills, twisted bleeps, pitched vocal loops and rich polyphonic pads, tempo-synced and key-labelled 100/140bpm MIDI is provided as standard across all pitched folders.
With warped space sound design, retro analogue hoovers and frenzied liquid drum grooves, Eclectic Drum & Bass combines the very best of Neuro, Tech-Step and Liquid genres across 1GB+ of loops, samples, MIDI and patches at 174bpm. Rich polyphonic pads, rip-roaring riser FX, sitar-style FM leads and cone-quaking subs in the style of Noisia, Ulterior Motive, Pendulum, Amoss and Artificial Intelligence for maximum dancefloor impact and after-hours bliss!
Pooling an awe-inspiring collection of sounds from Sample Magic’s award-winning team of producers, Future Beat includes a diverse selection of forward thinking loops, hits and over 40 presets for Lives onboard synths. Expertly worked into a extensive library of Live Sets, clips, and fully designed Drum and Instrument Racks, Future Beat weighs in at a mammoth 4GB+. Punchy drums, low slung bass, silken leads, analogue inspired pads and much more… Sampled from an impressive array of analogue and digital gear.
Maximum percussion
11 Drum Racks provide all the percussive fuel you need to power your grooves. The ten standard Racks have been put together to cover the spectrum of urban flavours, from laid-back R&B jams to brooding trap workouts and everything in between. Alternatively, the Selector kit lets you effortlessly browse 180 kicks, snares, claps, hi-hats and other percussion within a single Rack to build your own custom kits in seconds – just the thing for getting rhythmic ideas down fast.
Synths to go
Every one of Future Beat’s Instrument Racks is based on an Operator, Analog or multisampled Simpler patch feeding into an extended chain of effects. The sampled Instruments were created using a who’s-who of vintage and modern synths, including the Roland Juno-6, Korg Mono/Poly and Nord Lead 2x. Sonically expansive and easy to play, every one of them has been specifically built to best reproduce today’s urban sound.
FX, Sets, loops and one-shots
Also included are 10 colourful Effects Racks, and 5 fully produced Live Sets putting Future Beat’s Drum and Instrument Racks into action. Use their component beats, basslines, leads and chord progressions as is, or as starting points for your own ideas.
Finally, the Pack wraps up with 250 inspirational drum and music loops (the latter with MIDI files for alternative sound sourcing), and 100 one-shot synth and FX samples.
Covering the full spectrum of modern trap, footwork, hip-hop and R&B, Future Beat gives beginners a complete construction kit of easily manipulated building blocks, and experienced producers everything they need to compose new tracks in note-by-note detail from the ground up, or find those vital missing elements required to finish existing ones.
Dust off your MPC for an old-school collection of bass heavy grooves, soulful keys and treasure trove vinyl funk. From the best-selling producer of Golden Era comes over 1GB+ of classic hip-hop, rare groove cuts and trip-hop vibes. Take a dip into a vintage archive of masterfully crafted breaks chops, booming 808s, jazzy horn stabs, tape saturated atmospheres and silky guitar loops across 90 – 110bpm.
The Ibiza season draws to a close but the white isle spirit lives on in Sleepless House with 1.04GB of raw tech and jackin’ house sounds. Create your instant retro house classic with snappy analogue drum beats, wide and boomy bass, glitchy vocal snippets, epic chord lines and much more. A genre-spanning collection of loops, MIDI and one-shots guaranteed to inject Balearic bliss to your tracks.
At the crossroads of Bonobo, Ninja Tune and Four Tet exists ’Organic Electronica’ – as musical and rootsy as it is original and contemporary. Floaty vocal melodies combine with rich analogue pads, shuffling acoustic breaks anchor organic bells and pumping subs. Combining the best of exotic and other-worldy soundscapes, get to grips with 1.1GB+ of loops, kits and MIDI for the ultimate in ethereal electronica.
The $10 Presence XT Solid-State Drive
One of Studio One Pro’s assets is that it comes with a lot of content—well over 20 GB. But of course, you need to figure out where you’re going to put it. If you have a laptop with an SSD boot drive, every gigabyte counts and you might not want it living on your system disk. Also, although the old saying goes “you can never be too rich or too thin,” I’d add “and you can never have too fast a load time for samples.”
Like many people, I use three separate drives on my desktop: system, projects, and samples (including SoundSets and loops). With USB 3.0 flash drives coming down in price, you can put all of Studio One’s SoundSets on a 32 GB flash drive, which at my last price check was $10 (I took it a little further, and spent an extra $20 for a USB 3.0 128 GB flash drive that can spew out data wicked fast).
I deleted the default SoundSet folder, copied all my SoundSets over to the flash drive, then added the flash drive location at Studio One > Options > Locations > Soundsets (in this case, it’s H:\Sound Sets). Note that you can’t delete the default location for Sound Sets, so unless you actually delete the Sound Sets in the default location, Studio One will still see them.
USB 3.0 flash drives are super-fast for reading (and still pretty fast for writing). You’ll see the difference when Studio One scans the Sound Sets, and also, when loading instruments that take up a couple hundred megabytes. Furthermore, Sound Sets are compatible with Mac or Windows. So when I want to take my SSD-based MacBook Pro (which never seems to have quite enough space) on the road, I just pop the flash drive out of my Windows desktop, and take the Sound Sets with me. Yes, it’s literally “good to go.”
The Dim Solo function lets you hear a soloed track at full volume, and the rest of the mix at a considerably lower (dimmed) level. This is very handy when making edits on a track that need to be done in context, but you need to hear the track being edited at a louder volume to make sure you don’t miss any details.
Although Studio One doesn’t have a Dim Solo function per se, it’s easy to set one up!
Now you can bring down the Main bus level to choose the amount of “dimming” for all the tracks except for the one assigned to Sub 1, whose track fader controls its level relative to the rest of the mix—make it as loud as you want, and the other tracks as soft as you want.
And how about two bonus Solo tips…
What’s your favorite thing about your job? Why did you choose to work here?
I love working with people that challenge me to become better. I choose to work here because I knew PreSonus offered a lot of intellectual growth and it will really further my career. The fact that there are so many Star Wars fans turned out to be icing on the cake.
Who has the best Christmas album of all time?
Trans-Siberian Orchestra hands down. I worked at a restaurant for many college Christmases and I can’t listen to too much of that.
What do you do for fun?
I have 2 small sons (4 and 2) so anything that would keep them entertained is fair game. Watching sports also, I love watching sports.
What do you love about R80?
I love that they have allowed me to hear new things in songs that I didn’t know were there. The tweeters make the sound very crisp. I haven’t found any type of music that doesn’t sound great.
Got any tips for working with the R80?
Get a really good quality recording to truly appreciate the sound. Use that recording to tune the speakers for your space, tuned well placed speakers makes a big difference.
Notion 6.3 is available now! It’s free to Notion 6+ users. Launch Notion and click “check for updates” in the drop-down menu to get it.
Community Presets
Notion ships with built-in presets for several popular VST libraries (including Vienna Symphonic Library, Miroslav and Garritan). And for those we don’t support out of the box, you can use Notion’s Rules Editor to quickly make your own. But what if you don’t have time to create a new one? Or you want to make changes to our built-in presets? Or you want to share your presets with a pal?
Notion 6.3 now adds:
Find it at: https://github.com/notionmusic/presets
Export for SMP Press
SMP Press from Sheet Music Plus, is a self-publishing portal for composers. If you’re ready to get your materials uploaded to SMP Press but not sure how to create a single PDF that includes your score AND all your parts AND need to make an mp3, then this is the new feature for you…
Notation
Audio
Rules Editor and VST’s
General
Explore 250 exciting presets for your Mai Tai synth engine in Studio One! EDM Synth Classics is the follow-up to our hugely successful Analog Model Machine from Ari Ahrendt.
Take your Mai Tai sound library to a new level with EDM Synth Classics, the follow-up title to the hugely successful Analog Model Machine! Modern, club-friendly, extreme and aggressive—these 250 presets are tailored for classic and contemporary EDM, electro house, minimal, psytrance, dance hall, chill, progressive, and hardstyle. These versatile presets include basses, mono and poly leads, pads, drums and effects that are right at home in clubs, festivals, soundtracks, videos, or radio spots.
EDM Synth Classics are made for ultra-fast editing and expressive live performance. Use the modwheel for drastic sound-shaping and morphing and create completely different sounds by saving a fixed modwheel position within your song. All presets are volume-matched for added usability and compatibility. Drum sounds are tuned to the General MIDI (GM) map (kick drums on C, snares on D), making it easy to create entire drum kits from either multiple instances of Mai Tai on separate tracks or inside a Multi Instrument (Studio One Professional only).
Create Virtual “Room Mics”
Room mics can add ambiance and enhance the stereo image, but with close-miking and direct injection recording, we lose that sense of space. The lack of room mics is particularly noticeable with an instrument recorded direct, when it’s mixed with miked acoustic or electric tracks; the direct track just won’t seem to mesh quite right with the other sounds.
Room mics add short, discrete echos. Splitting the audio into four Analog Delay processors as parallel inserts does a fine job of emulating room ambiance.
First, set up the Splitter for four splits, and choose Channel Split for the Split Mode.
Set the controls on the four delays identically except for the four time parameters; turn off Sync and choose 11, 13, 17, and 23 ms. These are prime numbers so they don’t create resonances with each other.
Now use the Channel Editor to create macro knobs for controlling the Mix, Feedback, and High Cut. Assign Knob 1 to the Mix controls on all four delays. Set this to go from minimum to maximum so that if you use this FX Chain as a bus effect, you can set Mix for maximum (no dry signal). Otherwise, when used as an Insert, you’ll likely keep the Mix at 50% or below.
The second knob controls Feedback level. I’ve limited the maximum amount to around 60% for each of the delays. Experiment with this knob depending on the audio source; more feedback gives more diffusion. With percussive instruments like drums, you’ll want more feedback than with sustained instruments.
The third knob controls the amount of High Cut for the delays. Set this so the High Cut doesn’t go much lower than 2.5 kHz.
To hear what this FX Chain can do, load a mono AudioLoop like Guitar > Pop > Dry > 01a Basement Jam E min. Set Mix and Feedback to around 40%, and High Cut to 7 kHz or so. You’ll hear the guitar playing in a room, with a lifelike stereo image.
And don’t forget to save the FX Chain—you’ll likely want to use it again!