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Free Stuff Friday: Commodore 64 Sounds, Analog Bass, and a Gate Sequencer
With Free Stuff Friday now an established institution here in Abletonland, we’re curious to hear what you’ve made with all this stuff. So, as a B.I.G. man once said: if you don’t know, now you know: get at us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and let us know what you’ve made - use #MadewithLive and #MadewithPush.
Now - on to the free stuff:
Vintage VGM
You probably know the Commodore 64 as a legendary computer - for work, for games, for its role in launching the demoscene. You might not be as familiar with the SID chip, the Commodore 64’s synthesis chip, which allowed for sound generation and composition with a home computer (a pretty novel concept in the early 1980s!).
The SID chip is prized for its sound, especially when it comes to warm, gritty basses, and dirty, digital sound effects. Here’s a SID-made melody from the game “Lazy Jones” - you might recognize it from a later form, as the basis for Zombie Nation’s smash hit, “Kernkraft 400”:
And here’s a more recent track, which references the SID chip both in sound and title:
“Cyclotron C64 SID” by Harmonic 313
Musician and sound designer Luke’s Anger knows the SID sound well, sampling liberally from his own Commodore 64 - you’d expect as much from someone who also runs a record label called Bonus Round. He’s shared a set of royalty-free SID sounds as Racks in a Pack - preview below:
Physically modeled on vintage analog circuits, Analog comes as part of Live 9 Suite, and is dripping with the character and subtlety of a real analog synth. Recently, the minds as Ableton Live Expert - including Certified Trainers Phelan Kane and Martin Delaney - launched a tutorial series to get the most of out this versatile virtual beast. In conjunction with the new tutorials, there’s a set of eight detailed synth bass presets for Analog - download them free below.
Audio gate effects - also known as “trance gates” - are nothing new. But GateWay, a new free Max for Live effect from our friends at maxforcats (hot off the release of two new premium devices), offers some novel new features: the gate can be triggered by a sequencer or by an audio threshold, with the attack, decay, and curve of the gate envelope further adjustable. From classic percussive gates to faster glitchy madness, GateWay is a versatile effect with some serious capabilities.
