Customised Synthstrom Audible Deluge

One of my background tasks for the past few months has been researching mid-to-high-end 'grooveboxes'. Whilst the marketplace has lots of low cost (sub $500~) examples of 'single portable boxes that can create music using MIDI and samples' (aka grooveboxes, although there are much more sophisticated and complex definitions), from Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operators, OP-1/Z, the Roland MC-101, Novation's (hard to beat) Circuit, Korg's Electribe 2, Elektron's Digitone/Digitakt and Model:Cycles, Polyend's Tracker, the 1010 Music Blackbox, plus many more, the next level up is significantly more sparsely populated and much more diverse in approaches. Doubling the budget ($500-$1000 and more) can get you a much more capable device, but I wanted to know which one was best suited to my way of thinking? 

(The title of this post kind of gives away the end result, of course!)

Many years ago, I remember being greeted with a certain amount of disbelief when I expressed my opinion that the major deciding factor in choosing a DAW should be the workflow and its alignment with your own internal mental model of how to make music. It seemed that brand-name, who else used it, resolution, number of tracks, latency, bundled plug-ins and many other factors were far more important to many people. My opinion hasn't changed, although I have found that I have increasingly moved to the 'boutique' end of the market: small, independent manufacturers who tend to be musicians and technologists. As an example, my most sophisticated pedal is a Poly:Digit, which isn't exactly mainstream...

The other vitally important word in that brief definition is 'single'. When I go away from a DAW with access to external hardware synths and effects, into the 'live performance' scenario, then I'm looking for ideally one box, and probably three boxes maximum. I've played the game of having lots of equipment to set up and tear down, and like most people who have done that more than a few times, I have decided that:

Simplicity Means Less To Go Wrong! 

But back to those 'next level up' grooveboxes. So what are the main contenders? I whittled the list down to these:

- Elektron Octatrack (mk1 or mk2 (mk2 is a makeover that is probably more like a 1+))

- Roland MC-707

- ModDuo X

- Synthstrom Audible Deluge

- Akai Force

- plus a few others that were fighting for attention (MPCs!), and I even considered a few no-longer-current devices - even though trying to find second hand gear can be stressful... 

As always, your favourite is probably missing from this shortlist. Note that I deliberately rejected these whole categories:

- hardware 'sequencer-only' devices (no Squarp Pyramid or Polyend Seq or Social Entropy Engine...) 

- hardware controllers that require a DAW or computer (NI Maschine, Ableton Push...)

- modular 'sequencers plus a few modules'. (Creeping module purchases means your rig is never quite finished...)

My opinions

After months of careful research, here's my personal opinions:

- Elektron Octatrack. 

The Octatrack has been bubbling under on my GAS list for a long time. And that's probably the main issue - it has been around for so long that it may be about to be replaced, and I hate buying something which is immediately replaced by something much better for less money! 

Pros. Flexible sample playback, a song-mode sequencer (the Digitone and Digitakt lose points because of their lack of song support), and some neat processing. The eight channle scan also be used as a mixer, which is interesting. Looping support is also good. The Mark II's slider control is definitely a good reason to go for this in preference to the Mark I.

Cons. Seems to be difficult to learn. This might be the classic 'I will say it is hard to use because that makes me look good!' situation, but the YouTube video's of people using Octatracks seem to reinforce the amount of learning that is required. Is complexity what I want in a live environment? Probably not. Also, most people seem to use other gear with an Octatrack, so that's a concern. Finally, there's the nagging doubt that there's probably a Mark III in the pipeline, or maybe even a total revision.

- Roland MC-707

My first album was recorded using a TB-303, a TR-606 a Sequential Pro-One and a Casio CT-1000, and I've currently got a heavily modded TR-505, so I'm no stranger to Roland gear. The MC-707 is kind of what I reckon an Elektron Octatrack 3 might be like, although with a different workflow...

Pros. Ableton Live-style grid is a plus. Lots of immediately editable sounds without any need for a computer (probably the top feature request for the Novation Circuit 2). 

Cons. No song-mode is a major disadvantage. At the sub-$500 price-point then this is acceptable, but I've spent too long with old school drum machines to want me to be constantly controlling what is happening. No way to send MIDI CCs might also be a problem if I was going to use it with anything else... No 'Scale' mode for the buttons is weird when most of the sub-$500 group have this! Having to effectively sacrifice a track to sequence external MIDI is strange, but again, for a single box then this is not as important as it might be if I was using this as the centre-piece of a studio. 

- ModDuo X

I've been trying to buy one of these for over a year now, and it seems to be permanently out of stock, with pre-orders all being consumed in a few seconds of the site accepting them. So I've more or less given up on this one. I talked to Mod at one of the Ableton Loop events, and they seemed very confident, maybe not in a good way. Given their apparent supply chain problems, maybe my gut feeling was correct... 

- Synthstrom Audible Deluge

Definitely a 'boutique' device, this goes against the grain in all the right ways. No display - well, not a display in the conventional sense, although if you scaled up a Novation Circuit, it could well look a lot like this. An interesting design, with unusual/novel controls that make a lot of sense. 

Pros. Small, light, song-mode (plus arranger functions), Subtractive and FM synths, sample replay, and looping. Comprehensive features and a very good firmware update policy (frequent!). Seems to think the same way that I do!

Cons. Using the display as the main control means that you can spend a lot of time jumping in and out of song mode. As with the Octatrack, there seem to be a lot of shortcuts that require muscle-memory to learn. 

- Akai Force

I immediately thought of a 'DAW in a box' when I first saw this, and this is too much like a Push and Ableton Live. I would struggle to say that I was 'DAWless' if I used one of these.

The result?

I went for a Synthstrom Audible Deluge (a 'Deluge' from this point onwards). It offered the features I wanted, the size and weight and convenience, and a pretty good 'single box' solution. When it arrived, the adapter envelope had a note on it:

So I took the 'Martin :)' and turned it into a label for the top panel:

So if you ever see a 'Martin :)' where you were expecting a Deluge, then that will be me!

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I will report on my progress with the Deluge as I get familiar with it... So far, I'm definitely enjoying it!

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Behind the scenes of 'Synthesizerwriter's 29 Bagpipes...'

At the very end of December 2019, my very late (too late!) non-submission for Christian Henson's '29 Bagpipes' competition finally made it onto the Pianobook Library (if you haven't visited this amazing resource for samplists, synthesists and composers yet, then you should!). This blog post aims to augment the accompanying video (included below) with additional notes, to aid anyone who wants more information on how I produced the core samples, and more discussion about the principles behind the RUSS synthesis technique that I used in Ableton Live and Native Instruments Kontakt to make some example sounds using the samples.

1 of 29...

Principles

First of all, the samples that I extracted from the source '29 bagpipes' recording are not very conventional. They are long (about 22 seconds in this case), looped (so that you can choose any start position - controlled by an LFO, velocity or any other controller), in stereo, and they are split into two parts: a harmonic part and an inharmonic part (the harmonic part contains the 'tuned' part of the sound (the bit that you might try to whistle), whilst the inharmonic bit contains all of the noisy, clunky, thumpy, bang. spectral 'rubbish' that gives the sound its character and realism). The intention is that the samples should contain no information about any timbral changes over the duration of the sample - so, although the samples contain varying mixtures of frequencies, these do not change over time in the same way that would occur for the sound that has been sampled. These are raw sound sources, although they are far removed from the rather sterile oscillators that you find in most subtractive synthesisers. I remember that one reviewer of my book on 'Sound Synthesis and Sampling' took great delight in counting exactly how many pages it took me to finally describe what an oscillator actually did - well, part of the reason is that I don't think that enough time is spent on making the raw sound sources as good as they can be... Suffice it to say that these 'samples used as oscillators' are not sterile, boring or static.

The next thing to think about is the split of the raw source material (those 29 bagpipes et al...) into two 'as-orthogonal-as-I-can-make-them' parts. One of the things that always niggled away at me when using samples was the way that the harmonic 'tuned' bit was always 'bound' with the rest of the untuned, inharmonic 'stuff', so if you changed the pitch of the sample, then the pitch of the harmonic part and the inharmonic part both changed. Now in a real instrument, if you change the pitch of a note that it is producing, then the size of the instrument, its resonances, its rattles, its clunks and bangs, do not necessarily change in pitch in the same way. So I always wanted to be able to work with the harmonic part and the inharmonic part of a sample separately - and this is what I have been researching and working on for many, many years. There's a YouTube video where someone enquires in the comments about whatever happened to me (since I'm not as visible reviewing synthesizers as I was 25 years ago), and so now you know the answer - I've been working on fundamentally changing the way that sound synthesis works. Nothing major...

When you have separate samples for the harmonic and inharmonic part, then all sorts of interesting things open up. A lot of the characteristic timbre-defining 'attack' stage of percussive instruments turns out to be mostly inharmonics, and just making changes to that part can radically change your perception of the sound. Long releases on inharmonics parts sound can sound very much like reverb, but reverb that isn't bogged down in lots of pitched 'mush'. Swapping the inharmonics from one instrument to another doesn't give a simple mixture of the two instruments as you might imagine it would - instead it is more like hearing an unusual and distant relative from the same musical instrument family of the source of the inharmonic part. And that's the disarming bit - it seems that whilst our ears love the pitched part for intelligent, clever things like tunes and melodies, the deeply interesting, satisfying, 'characterful', visceral stuff is actually in those noisy, clangorous, nasty inharmonics.

Extraction

There's a lot of fine detail in taking 51-ish seconds of 29 bagpipes tuning up and turning it into looped stereo samples, and a lot of it is boring, repetitive work - there aren't many tools in this space yet!

The first thing I do is listen to the raw source material:

Audacity is my audio editor of choice, although I have been looking at Serato Studio as a 'next level up' way of assembling beats... From the looks (and sound) of this 51.1 seconds-worth, there's a pretty constant level, and a lot of interesting content: bagpipes, singing and various other background ephemera. The spectrum next:

So the loudest component is at -25 dB and is at 240 Hz - A#3, so that's going to be my first target frequency (although I might try some others...). I tend to scan across the frequency axis, looking for any peaks at multiples of the dominant peak, and there seem to be some candidates. Most notably though, is all of that broad-band noise at just under -48 dB, which looks like it is going to provide lots of inharmonics. If this was a sample of an electric piano tine, then it would look very different, with lots more easily identifiable harmonic components, and a lower 'noise' floor. But Christian deliberately provided challenging source material, so none of this is unexpected!

My current preference is to split the harmonic and inharmonic content into stereo pairs by using two different frequencies for the separation filters. A fixed difference of one hertz seems to give good results, although I've also tried halving the frequency difference per octave up the frequency axis. Because the numbers are easier with fixed differences, then that's what I used here - I will make a spreadsheet to automate the calculations when I have time (and post-Thanksgiving and 'post-'End-of-Year' offers are a big distraction at the moment...)

The extracted harmonic content looks interesting:

This is quite typical for extracted harmonic content. Notice that the dynamic range is higher than the source material, and that a lot of the high frequencies are removed by the low pass filter.

The spectrum reveals more detail:

The harmonics are now much more visible, and the 'noise' floor has dropped by about 20dB, which gives a usable margin, although a bit more time cleaning up the sample would be needed to get to the standards of Spitfire Audio, of course. But this is only a quick example to see what can be extracted from deliberately difficult material, so usable is fine. In many cases, I actually prefer the sound of 'less processed' samples - doing too many passes of separation filtering can start to sound artificial.

Repeating for the lower frequency and combining gives the stereo pair:

The variation in the two channels is not unusual when doing separation! If you listen to just the raw looped samples (which are effectively the first 20 seconds or so of this) then you get lots of interesting stereo imaging and lots of harmonic movement (dynamic timbral changes) - not at all like listening to a conventional sawtooth waveform! The long length of the separated samples is to enable lots of variation of sample start position (via round-robin, velocity, controller...) and is one of the bits of sampling technology that rarely seems to make it into synthesis (except here, as a counter example!). I'm that most dangerous type of samplists and synthesists: an impurist who will use any technique to get good sounds!

The extracted inharmonics are also interesting, but for very different reasons. You can hear some of the singing much more clearly for example. Some samples that I have processed reveal 'noises off' that weren't caught during recording...

Unlike the harmonic content, the inharmonic has less dynamic range, and since all of those high frequencies are not filtered out, it looks a lot like the original source material. But the sound is very different - there is some leakage of harmonic material (no processing is perfect!), but the majority is all of the 'other' stuff that was going on during the recording: singing, tuning up, extraneous sounds, etc.

The stereo pair is revealing:

The combination of lots of broad-band noise plus no filtering of high frequencies gives two apparently similar channels, although if you listen there are some differences. I have experimented with using broader difference frequencies, and different Q factors on the filtering, but I haven't reached any firm conclusions on the best approach yet...

Synthesis...

Using two pairs of looped stereo samples is going to soak up computing resources - sorry! As a partial mitigation, there are only a few samples across the keyboard:

This screenshot is from Ableton Live's Instrument Rack, where I'm using multiple instances of Sampler to play back the samples. The samples are in pairs (harmonics and inharmonics) and there are only four ranges. Remember though, that the looped samples are solely a source of frequencies, and any timbral or volume variation is solely provided by 'synthesis' processing, so a lot of the clues that you get from timing of decays or attacks (or detuning) in normal sample playback are not present. RUSS synthesis is very much a mixture of sampling AND synthesis!

A quick word on inharmonics... I have always wondered why subtractive (and other) synthesizers typically give you several choices of oscillator waveform, but only one (white) or maybe a second (pink) choice for 'noise'? There are lots of other sources of inharmonic 'noise' that could be used (hey, even a ring modulator would be better than nothing!), but what tends to be provided is broad-band noise. Yes, you can do quite a lot with that noise by processing it, but, no, there's lots more to inharmonic noises than just broad-spectrum hiss. Now you may be asking: like what? The answer to which is: separated inharmonic sounds. There's a reason why I've been dissatisfied with conventional synthesis noise provision, and if you are reading this, then you are seeing part of the answer. Maybe at some stage I will release a set of inharmonic samples that are completely useless for conventional tuned sounds, but which are very useful in combination with tuned sounds...

Content tips and hints...

The example Kontakt instruments have 'Vel' as part of the name when they have velocity sensitivity built-in. I'm one of those unusual people who likes extreme levels of velocity-driven variation in sounds, and so the sounds that I make tend to incorporate velocity sensitivity. But this may be unusual, as Paul Ward intimated to me at the 2019 Synthfest UK in Sheffield (thoroughly recommended, btw!), and so if you are a 'Controller-mapper' person, then you may want to avoid the Multis with 'Vel' in the name.

Yes, I can spell 'Kontakt', although the autocorrection 'feature' in various layers between me and the Squarespace web-site for Pianobook seems to think it is spelled 'Contact'!

The Ableton Live Instrument Rack instruments didn't make it into the Pianobook Library zip file, but I will try to get an update that includes them. There's just not enough time!

And finally, some thoughts on what you can do with the inharmonic samples. First, some simple things to try.
1. Use inharmonic samples with fast attacks and decays to form the 'Attack' phase of a sound (as popularised by Roland's D-50 synth...).
2. Use the same envelopes for the harmonics and inharmonics, and then alter the keyboard scaling/tracking of the inharmonics so that it doesn't track at all (0% - and this is one reason why Kontakt lets you do this!) through to 100% or more. At zero percent you get an instrument whose size feels strange, whilst as you move towards 100% you get variations of realism. Filtering the inharmonics (or mapping them to velocity) can give some very metallic sounds.
3. Use slow envelopes for the harmonics, and slower envelopes for the inharmonics, and play with the scaling/tracking of the inharmonics (or even reverse them). Band-pass filtering can be good for placing the apparent resonances of the virtual instrument that you are synthesizing.
4. You CAN detune the inharmonics - they don't care! 5ths, 9ths or even totally out-of-tune (or inverted) are all acceptable. Your ears will hear the harmonics as the 'tuned' part, and will assume that everything else is just an integral part of the sound that the instrument makes whilst being played in that acoustic environment. Your entire life has probably been spent listening to sounds where the harmonics and inharmonics are tightly linked together, so you are exceptionally well trained in assuming that this is the case, even when you hear sounds where it isn't a valid model for how the sound has been constructed.
5. You can take the inharmonics from one sample, and play them with the harmonics from another sample. So you could take the high samples and use them in the low register and vice-versa. More broadly, I have some inharmonics taken from a 'classic' monosynth, and they contain some of the distortion, noise, intermodulation, mains hum, hiss and other artefacts that give that monosynth it's particular sound. Add them to another harmonic sample and you get a strange combination of the two 'characters'... Hmm, that's me talking myself into releasing inharmonic samples again...


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Residuals Using Simple Separation - Seminar at Synthfest UK 2018

On Saturday the 6th of October, 2018, at 2:45, I presented a seminar about my method of using residual samples to do sound synthesis at the 2018 Synthfest UK event.

The title of the seminar was 'Sound Synthesis Using Residuals', and it described some research that I have been doing.

I promised to make the Nyquist filters for the Audacity audio editor available, and here is the link:

Filters for Audacity

The two filters look like this:

The 'Harmonic Extractor' filter outputs only the harmonics of the input, if the frequency of the narrow peaks matches the pitch of the input.

The 'Harmonic Rejector' outputs everything except the harmonics of the input (the 'inharmonics'), if the frequency of the deep notches matches the pitch of the input.

The shapes of these filters are not your ordinary synthesiser staples like low-pass filters. The shape of the harmonic extraction filter is sometimes called a 'teeth' or 'tooth' filter, whilst the harmonic rejection filter is often called a 'comb' filter.

Harmonics and frequencies are related in a not-quite-straightorward way. The pitch frequency is called the Fundamental, and is often represented by the symbol 'f' (for frequency). The first harmonic is at twice the frequency of the fundamental (2f), the second harmonic is at three times the fundamental (3f), and so on until your ears run out of range, or a digital representation of the audio gets close to half of the sampling rate and starts to be filtered out to avoid aliasing. Usually, all you need to know is that you add one to the harmonic to know what multiple of the fundamental frequency it is. So if the fundamental is 100Hz (f), then the 1st harmonic is at 200Hz (2f), the 2nd harmonic is at 300Hz (3f), and so on.  

What these filters do is to align the peaks or notches so that they match the harmonics of the input sound, and they then either extract or reject the harmonics in that sound. (This process is not perfect, of course...)

The RUSS synthesis technique uses these two filters to extract the harmonic part, and the inharmonic part, of the input sample. Once you have these two parts (called residuals), then you can use conventional S&S synthesis to create sounds using them as raw material. Separating the sample into two residuals lets you do all sorts of interesting edits...

More information on the RUSS synthesis technique can be found here.

AES@NAMM: Residuals Using Simple Separation

AES@NAMM 2018 Pro-Sound Symposium in Anaheim, California

My presentation: Thursday the 25th in Hilton Huntingdon A Level 4, 11am, 45 minutes, 

repeated Sunday the 28th in Hilton Huntingdon A Level 4, 11am, 45 minutes

Normally I just post personal research results in this blog (e.g. the MIDI Interfaces investigation), but when I’m presenting an academic paper at a real event, then this blog seems like a good place to gather all of the related information into one place...

For more years than I really want to think about, I have been looking into ways to use samples as the raw material for synthesis. Having spent my formative years during the rise of S&S (Sample and Synthesis (processing)), and with the E-mu Morpheus as one of my all-time favourite synths (or more correctly, sample replay devices with synthesiser-style post processing - and in the case of the Morpheus (and a few other favoured E-mu devices), that wonderful morphing Z-Plane filter!), then my aim has been to see just how far samples can be exploited in a synthesis context.

Research on 'Using samples for synthesis'...

The results of lots of thinking about how samples work, and how to make the most of them, particularly in a practical way. This is the topic of a paper that I’m presenting at the AES@NAMM 2018 Pro-Sound Symposium in Anaheim, California, on Thursday the 25th in Huntingdon A Level 4. I’m on at 11am for 45 minutes, and there’s a lot to try and pack into the time…

Supporting material (posted here as it becomes available…)

Demo video. First, here’s the 'teaser' ‘demonstration’ video that shows some of the results - using a single sample of an aluminium can (‘tin can’ is much shorter and easier to type, even though the metal is not tin!). This does not go into the theory or practice in much depth.

AES@NAMM. Here’s a link to the AES@NAMM web-site.

AES@NAMM Pro-Sound Symposium. This is a link to the event itself.

The AES@NAMM Schedule. Who is speaking when and where...

'Residuals Using Simple Separation'  The link to the presentation schedule - it’s an AES ‘Engineering Brief’. 

'Residuals Using Simple Separation - the paper'. The link to the paper itself.

'Residuals Using Simple Separation' Powerpoint. Here’s a link to the slides from the presentation, where I talk about some of the background theory (there's more in the paper), and do some demonstrations. I’m going to post some more detailed audio demonstrations on SoundCloud and Youtube later too.

Now available... Here’s a link where you can download the Ableton Live Instrument Rack device that I used to do the demos in the video and the presentation. You will need to prepare two samples (or more) using the RUSS filters (below) and then drag^drop them into the two instances of Sampler inside the Rack. There’s lots of scope for a more intelligent front-end to doing this form of ‘synthesis using samples’. 

Now available... I have now partly tidied up the Nyqvist code for the sample processing routines that I used inside Audacity, the link is at the end of this paragraphl. They are released using a GPL licence. There are also a lot of possibilities to make the required sample processing smarter and more automated, and I hope to see some cool stuff released that makes the most of the creative possibilities. Filters etc are here...

I’m considering writing an M4L ‘assist ‘plug-in’, but I’m sure that a better coder than myself is going to beat me to it with something really cool and sophisticated.

I’m working on a ‘user manual’ for the techniques that are described in the paper and presentation, and I’m more than happy to talk to sample library creators about how they can use the concepts to enhance the flexibility and usability of their samples. 

Enjoy!

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Drums - using layers in a rack...

The second part of my exploration of a commercial sample bundle is now available on the ModeAudio web-site. This time I actually used the 'Found Percussion' sounds for their intended purpose - drum sounds.







Actually, what I really do is just do layering of samples within a Rack, plus a bit of tweaking here and there. I find that this is one of the most useful parts of Ableton Live - the ability to be able to put together sounds into composites easily and quickly, and to have pretty comprehensive control of each sound layer. In many ways, the Ableton Rack is very similar to a modular synthesizer, but presented in a way that leads you to a specific way of doing things. This has the useful result that analysing a Rack is straight-forward: you just open it up and then look at each layer in turn. On a modular synthesizer I tend to have to work backwards from the output when I'm trying to figure out what someone has done in a patch...

The beauty of layering is that you can copy a layer and adjust the copy, or you can switch things in and out as required. In the article I do a couple of variations of a snare sound, and show how they have different spectrums (you might have a gap in the overall spectrum that each fits into, for example) - and of course, you can switch Spectrum in and out by using the power button too. A lot of my audio paths have stuff turned off using the power button that were used during development, and so they are ready to be included again when I need them.

The time it takes to become familiar with the possibilities of using Racks creatively is time well spent, in my opinion. I encourage all Ableton Live users to spend some time with Racks!

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• Humanizing Drums With Velocity Effect in Ableton Live

Winning was only the beginning...

I won a competition recently! (This is a rare event for me.) ModeAudio is an interesting web-site that combines informed articles on DAWs with thoughtfully curated audio packs, and two randomly selected people got to choose a bundle from their catalogue...

So, ModeAudio sent me a bundle of samples called 'Found Percussion': 4 Ableton Live packs containing an interesting and diverse set of 750 samples, plus kits, instruments, etc. Clear install instructions and neatly separated samples in named folders showed attention to detail, which matters more and more as you work with large numbers of samples. The 'UnderCover' set shows the thinking, with folders named: Woods (19), Metals (63), Plastics (29), Snaps (12), Lids (11), Glass (16), etc. (=number of samples in the folder), and containing named samples like: Bottle Rattle, Jewel case, Calculator Button, etc. 

First off, I auditioned all of each of the audio packs, then listened to the samples on their own, and then I explored deeper, adjusting the instruments and using the samples in ways that were probably slightly outside the intentions of the creators! It was great fun, and I found that the samples were a great trigger for creativity.

You can read more about my explorations in the ModeAudio magazine.

Pure Magic-netik!

I've enjoyed a full subscription to the excellent PureMagnetik website for the past year, and I have to say that it has been completely worth the money. The quality of the samples, sounds, instruments, effects and racks in the down-loadable Micropaks has been uniformly superb, and I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who uses Ableton Live, Kontakt or Logic.







So it gets my coveted 'Thoroughly Recommended' award, and would qualify for the rare and fabulous 'extra' star, if it weren't for one glitch in an otherwise faultless performance:

I had a problem with one of the 'Amp' racks in the 'Model C' (Hohner Clavinet) micropak, where I got no sound at all from it. I posted a message on the support forum (The Board) but got no replies at all, so I'm not entirely happy with the support, but then this is the first time I've needed it!

For the next year, I'm going to make some samples, sounds, etc. of my own for Live, so watch this space!

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