By m56p87
Mon Jan 07, 2013 7:49 pm
as you may I have read in my other thread, Ive been recently setting up and tweaking and old compaq presario laptop with Windows 98 installed as my primary machine. At first I was just using it for managing floppy disks and moving sound around etc.. but lately ive been downloading a few freeware applications to generate sounds and stumbled upon what is basically what i consider to be the holy grail of subtractive drum synthesis...
check it out - Hammerhead "Drum Synth 2"
http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/drumsynth.shtml
Its pretty straightforward, No MIDI, no exporting (but WAV copies of files are saved), just a "play" button to preview your sound (which is perfect for sampling into your mpc). But you can pretty much make any subtractively synthesized single hit you can imagine from techno stabs to 808 kicks. Yeah I know, its probably beneath where most members are used to being technology wise.. But it does have some really interesting features that allow for dialing in alot of control Ive not seen before. Some of the cool features include...
- You can set the Bit Depth +/- 2 bit at a time! Ive never seen this before, you can compress your sample to 14 bits or 10 bits if you wanted (granted its probably just dropping bits off the end instead of quantizing the data, then wrapping the file into a 16bit WAV.
- You can dial in your Sample Rate +/- 1000khz at a time. But i think its limited from 1khz-11khz (although with "distortion" off you can do the usual 44.1).
- There are some crazy ring modulation options, sure there is standard ring modulation. But there seem to be a few more options where you can decide which overtone the modulation originates/ends and there is also a really metallic "cymbal overtones" ring modulation options that really adds a ton of grit.
- Pretty much everything is available to modulate via independent visual envelopes. Perfect for simple drum synthesis because you can shape the noise layer separately from the oscillators. Multiple Amp Envelopes are something I always need when making single drum hits, and its not as common as you would think on modern soft synths.
- SO MANY NOISE LAYERS! im sure if any of you have tried to synthesize a legit snare, you realize you need atleast 2 noise layers (as well as a sine/tri wave), one for the initial hit and one for the rattle. Well this thing has 3, and you get complete control over all of them.
this program is perfect for me because i make most of my tracks out of single hits and stabs. With the included library its clear you could never run out of ideas and sounds. The only caveat I see so far with the program is it probably some incarnation of wavetable synthesis where a single cycle is sampled and repeated instead of real subtractive synthesis, due to the lack of any cpu tax whatsoever. compared to other synthesized programs that lock up my machine pretty easily. (233mhz processor
)
Im running it on windows 98 no problem, Im guessing its compatible up to XP? Mac Users could probably easily run this with one of those sandboxed windows emulators, its a really simple program. Its dope, really has that sort of old drum machine sound. And best of all the whole **** program is only 150kb!!
check it out - Hammerhead "Drum Synth 2"
http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/drumsynth.shtml
Its pretty straightforward, No MIDI, no exporting (but WAV copies of files are saved), just a "play" button to preview your sound (which is perfect for sampling into your mpc). But you can pretty much make any subtractively synthesized single hit you can imagine from techno stabs to 808 kicks. Yeah I know, its probably beneath where most members are used to being technology wise.. But it does have some really interesting features that allow for dialing in alot of control Ive not seen before. Some of the cool features include...
- You can set the Bit Depth +/- 2 bit at a time! Ive never seen this before, you can compress your sample to 14 bits or 10 bits if you wanted (granted its probably just dropping bits off the end instead of quantizing the data, then wrapping the file into a 16bit WAV.
- You can dial in your Sample Rate +/- 1000khz at a time. But i think its limited from 1khz-11khz (although with "distortion" off you can do the usual 44.1).
- There are some crazy ring modulation options, sure there is standard ring modulation. But there seem to be a few more options where you can decide which overtone the modulation originates/ends and there is also a really metallic "cymbal overtones" ring modulation options that really adds a ton of grit.
- Pretty much everything is available to modulate via independent visual envelopes. Perfect for simple drum synthesis because you can shape the noise layer separately from the oscillators. Multiple Amp Envelopes are something I always need when making single drum hits, and its not as common as you would think on modern soft synths.
- SO MANY NOISE LAYERS! im sure if any of you have tried to synthesize a legit snare, you realize you need atleast 2 noise layers (as well as a sine/tri wave), one for the initial hit and one for the rattle. Well this thing has 3, and you get complete control over all of them.
this program is perfect for me because i make most of my tracks out of single hits and stabs. With the included library its clear you could never run out of ideas and sounds. The only caveat I see so far with the program is it probably some incarnation of wavetable synthesis where a single cycle is sampled and repeated instead of real subtractive synthesis, due to the lack of any cpu tax whatsoever. compared to other synthesized programs that lock up my machine pretty easily. (233mhz processor
)Im running it on windows 98 no problem, Im guessing its compatible up to XP? Mac Users could probably easily run this with one of those sandboxed windows emulators, its a really simple program. Its dope, really has that sort of old drum machine sound. And best of all the whole **** program is only 150kb!!
Last edited by m56p87 on Wed Jan 09, 2013 4:46 pm, edited 3 times in total.
