About

  This blog is a way for me to document and share my experiments in sampling.  There are many libraries out there which attempt to translate acoustic instruments into a playable virtual instrument.  I use many of these instruments and will be releasing a few such instruments myself, but what has really got me excited right now is the potential for “creative sampling”.  Lets face it, acoustic instruments are so incredibly nuanced and dynamic, a sampled version of that instrument will only ever be an imitation.  Traditional sampling is a reductive process.  There is potential however for the process of sampling to expand the potential of the acoustic source material, to play it and manipulate it in ways that would otherwise be impossible.  This site is dedicated to the acoustically impossible made possible through sampling.

23 Comments to About

  1. Keelerstein says:

    October 8th, 2009 at 2:37 am

    Congratulations and many thanks for a very interesting site. You should post a link on the vi-control.net forum, that seems to be where a lot of the kontakt community hang out.
    All the Best

  2. Brendan says:

    October 8th, 2009 at 9:57 am

    Great. Thanks for the tip. I’ll do that.

  3. SUMIT says:

    October 8th, 2009 at 2:18 pm

    CONGRATES BRENDAN,REALLY NICE….m at learning stage,m getting lot of ideas,knowledge,etc from u all ppl doing these stuff..best of luck

  4. Sista says:

    October 12th, 2009 at 9:44 am

    Yes, very very cool. I’m impressed. Great to witness some of the process of simple sound to song.

  5. Bronto Scorpio says:

    October 21st, 2009 at 1:27 pm

    Very, very nice page.
    I love the thing with the two glasses.
    I would like to know what kind of equipment you use to record?
    I’ve recently boght a simple Zoom H2 Recorder to get started with sampling and I realy having much fun with it.

    Please keep on going with this page! I realy love it.

    Cheers
    Dennis

    P.S.: Sorry for my poor english.

  6. Brendan says:

    October 21st, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    Thanks for the kind words Dennis. I really appreciate it. Wish I could understand your page, it looks really interesting. My equipment list is embarrassingly simple. I bought a Zoom H4n recently and have been using it a lot. All the glass stuff was recorded with that. Sometimes I arrange to work in a studio cuz my home setup is pretty minimal. I’m not really a gear head to tell you the truth. Too much gear weighs down the creative process.

  7. Bronto Scorpio says:

    October 21st, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    Thanks for the quick answer Brendan.
    Inspired by your Glass sounds I also recorded such a sound.
    Here is the Original: http://www.bioencoder.de/bronto/GlassOriginal.mp3
    I Pitched it down, added a LFO to Pan, did some MS processing, Equilised a little bit, added some Granular Delay und a little bit Reverb.
    I think the result is a quite nice Atmosphere.
    Here is the result: http://www.bioencoder.de/bronto/GlassAtmo.mp3

    Thanks for this nice page and the inspiration i’m getting from it.

    Cheers
    Dennis

    P.S.: My english is realy bad, I hope you understand :)

  8. Brendan says:

    October 21st, 2009 at 5:33 pm

    Very cool. Thanks for sharing. I love the granular sounds, what did you do that with? Don’t worry about your English. It’s better than some native speakers I know. :)

  9. Bronto Scorpio says:

    October 21st, 2009 at 5:53 pm

    I used the +bubbler VST from the Soundhack delay trio (great sounding delays by the way). http://www.soundhack.com/freeware.php
    I forgot to mention that I also used the delay trick you mentioned in your “Heaters, Resonance” post to bring in some resonance (I always liked this on metallic, percussive sounds).
    What do you think about Kontakt 4? I realy want to try out the new morphing feature.

    Cheers
    Dennis

  10. tercathian says:

    November 11th, 2009 at 11:34 pm

    http://www.brendanjhogan.com/blog/post5/PenKit.zip.zip
    Link seems to be broken.

    Thanks for the instruments and the website. Very cool methodologies.

  11. Brendan says:

    November 12th, 2009 at 6:21 pm

    The link is fixed now. Thanks for letting me know. Cheers

  12. iain m says:

    December 13th, 2009 at 5:28 am

    Thanks for the great free instruments :)

    One question – in the Glasses pack, the multi “Glass Piano” asks for an impulse response, “snow steps” that doesn’t seem to be there. Could you upload this? Thanks!

  13. Brendan says:

    December 13th, 2009 at 10:35 am

    Thanks for letting me know. The glasses pack has been updated to include the “snow steps” IR. Also, if you enter in the this link
    http://www.brendanjhogan.com/blog/post1/snow_steps.aif you can download it directly.

  14. iain m says:

    December 21st, 2009 at 6:23 am

    Thanks for fixing that so quickly! :)

  15. iain m says:

    December 21st, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    Oh actually, there is one other thing… ;)

    The Pyrex Ensemble multi is asking for some files (Voc fett; tupperwhat 2, 3, 4, 5; and spacious ER).

  16. Brendan says:

    December 22nd, 2009 at 8:51 am

    Maybe you’ve tried this, but choosing “browse for folder” and then picking the samples folder included with the download should do the trick. In case it doesn’t I’ve re-uploaded the pyrex.zip

  17. iain m says:

    December 22nd, 2009 at 3:11 pm

    thanks – works perfectly now :)

  18. George Solo says:

    December 28th, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    Brendan, great work regarding Kontakt! Really useful! Also, I love your sentence: “If you want to write a good song, write five songs, pick the best one, and don’t tell anyone about the other four.” You nailed it!

    Cheers,
    George

  19. Brendan says:

    December 29th, 2009 at 10:31 pm

    Thanks George. I thought a lot about this when I listened to some old Tom Waits B side releases. I love Tom Waits but listening to those tracks I couldn’t help but think he probably should have kept some of them to himself. :) Sorry Tom. Anyway, thanks for reading and I enjoyed your blog as well.

  20. Cris says:

    January 4th, 2010 at 6:08 am

    Hi Brendan,
    I really like what you’ve put up so far, this is really my cup of tea. You’ve quite some interesting ideas and ways to transform the “organic” in a sound/soundwave, to nicely tonals, hamronics and somehow managed to squeeze all the elements into Kontakt.
    Coming from the C-64 demoscene with an acoustic background, I see a lot my mind transcribe into music here :)
    Best regards,
    Cris

  21. Brendan says:

    January 4th, 2010 at 1:36 pm

    Thanks Cris, glad you like it. I enjoyed the tracks on your site as well. “C-64 demoscene” wow, that takes me back. I first started making music using Impulse Tracker back in high school.

  22. Cris says:

    January 4th, 2010 at 11:03 pm

    Brendan:
    The first tracker I used was called “Future Composer”. It was actually an editor where you had to work with sectors and blocks. Each note corresponded a number. Like C would be 20, C# would be 21, D would be 22 and so on. To control a note’s behavour you used commands like .dur(ration), .sli(de), .por(tamento). So the whole “tracked” was based on time. Heh that was quite a challange. Later on I moved on to Noise-Tracker, Pro-Tracker to finally end up with Renoise :) Allthough today I use sequencers to make my music. I am glad you enjoyed my tracks.
    /Cris

  23. Moz says:

    January 12th, 2010 at 10:08 pm

    love this site – so much to learn in Kontakt..

Leave a comment