Bedroom Producer

Truly great and beautiful videoclip by Japanese animation artist Daihei Shibata. For the best experience click on the video and watch it on the Vimeo site, with HD enabled.

:papercutz – Lylac (Helios Remix) from :papercutz on Vimeo.

This is the first in a series of sample pack reviews I’m planning to publish on this website. I’m trying to pick products and labels, which don’t get a lot of reviews, but I think deserve the praise.

Today I’m looking at the Rise sample pack from Push Button Bang. As its name might suggest, it is a good source for transitional effects to sprinkle over your almost-finished tracks. I couldn’t find a lot of information about the label itself, except for the marketing blurb over at Loopmasters.com. Based on their other sample packs their primary focus seems to be dark and electronic sounds for the most in-demand underground genres, like dubstep, UK garage,  fidget, etc. Rise is no exception to this, I already used some samples in the dubstep and breaks tunes I’m currently working on, but I can imagine using some of the lessdark and scary ones in trance tracks as well.

Rise is available in two formats, as described in the technical specifications on the Loopmasters page:

ZIP (main) Pack:

• 700 MB, 540 Exotic Fx Wavs

• 70  Bang FX
• 55  Climbers
• 20  Cymbal FX
• 40  Doppler FX
• 40  Drop-downs
• 60  Fader FX
• 60  Multiple Movements
• 65  Seamless Noise FX Loops
• 120 Transitional Elements

Ableton Live 7+ Pack:

• 540 Clip Versions
• 540 Simpler-based Rise racks
• 20  Multi-mix Sampler FX racks
• 10 Second-stage FX Processors

Being an Ableton Live user, I purchased the Live Pack, but obviously the raw WAV samples were also included. I played around a bit with the Simpler-based instrument racks, but eventually ended up using the WAV samples directly. As far as I can tell all the Simpler racks expose the same set of parameters, which could come in handy if you want to add some variety to the sound effects, but I just couldn’t bring myself to trigger the effects via MIDI. I prefer to have them as audio, so I can see the start, peak and end points and shift them to the right place on the timeline. In a live context the racks might prove more useful for spontaneous triggering and tweaking.

Simpler-based instrument rack

I haven’t purchased Ableton’s Sampler, so the handful of Samper-based instrument racks were useless to me and I can’t comment on those. However, the good people at Push Button Bang also included a few FX racks, which can be used to further mangle the sounds with resonators, delays, reverbs and so on. Nothing revolutionary here, but potentially useful, even as starting points to build your own custom FX racks.

The samples themselves are well produced – listen to the demos on the Loopmasters.com product page – and you get plenty of them in a well-organized folder structure. Users of other DAWs should not worry, they are not missing out compared to the Live-specific edition. I tend to think of the Live racks as a nice bonus and nothing more.

To sum it up: if you are looking for background effects to add the last polish to your dance tracks, Rise will provide lots of good bangs and swooshes for your buck.