My production partner and myself have just completed our second sample pack together for Sample Magic and Splice titled French House 2. In this article I want to take a quick look in some detail at some of the production techniques that went into it. You can buy the pack here.
Filtered samples, funky keys, pounding Parisien drums and disco riffs – French House 2 features 1GB+ of sounds inspired by over 20 years of groundbreaking French electronica. Packed together with WAV, MIDI, Ableton FX racks, and Massive presets – French House 2 comes fully equipped faithfully reworked funk-fuelled filter house to new-wave electro and pop-primed nu disco.
Here are some of the demos from the pack:
Main Demos:
Just Music Loops:
Just Guitars:
Just Drums:
Sample Magic French House 2
Here’s some of what I had to say on the pack’s conception and development:
“SM202 French House 2 is the follow up to our hugely successful SM41 French House. Packed with slamming classic drum machine loops, funky electric guitar, distorted basses, talking robot synths and royalty-free sped up disco loops, French House 2 is one of our most ambitious releases yet.”
“As with all of our packs, we began developing our ideas with several artistic references ranging from classic French House such as Daft Punk, Fred Falke, Alan Braxe and David Morales. Additionally, we also referenced French Touch and Filter Disco talents such as Le Knight Club, DJ Sneak, Alex Gopher, Étienne de Crécy and Lifelike. Label references include Ed Banger, Roulé, Crydamoure and Kitsuné.”
“We painstakingly recorded hundreds of original soul, disco, funk, rock, and pop loops in retro fashion – focusing on the 60s, 70s, and 80s. By paying special care and attention to detail at each stage, we strove to recreate those authentic sampling techniques used by the producers of the era.”
“In some cases, the drums, bass, guitar, keyboard or vintage synthesiser parts were chopped, screwed and then stemmed out for dedicated loops. In other instances, the whole mix was processed through various classic pumping compressions and retro filters in order to create our filter loops folder.”
“A great deal of the samples were pitched either up or down to add in sampling artefacts. We later ran them through the pumping Alesis 3060 compressor and filtered the sounds with boutique analogue hardware before subjecting them to more contemporary, french touch glitching processes.”
Cheat the Ageing Process
There are a plethora of tools that can simulate older records from vintage synth emulations, tape saturation, vintage compressors, boutique channel strips and retro reverb. Recording real instruments and treating them as if they were from a 60s/70s/80s record can yield fantastic results.
Logic, Ableton, you name it. They all come bundled with fantastic vintage emulation plug-ins. In Logic alone there are 1176, SSL, LA-2A and dbx 160 compressor clones, Pultec, API and Neve-style EQs combined with their excellent convolution reverb it’s never been easier to copy our favourite records.
Recording real instruments can make a huge difference too. While guitar, bass and keyboards are fairly rudimentary, you’d be amazed at what results you can get with just one mic on a drum kit. If you’re treating it as a sample, some high-pass filtering and a healthy dose of sidechain compression – no one would be any the wiser!
Simulate Retro Sampling Techniques
Older samplers had limited RAM so to circumnavigate that producers would record samples in two or three semitones above their target BPM and then pitch them down. The samplers-less than perfect artefacts would add an extra layer of hiss, crust and crunch to the newly pitched down samples. 4 Resampling Cut your sample by transient points into quarter or eighth notes and reload them into a sampler. Playing it back in a different order can really make you rethink the original loop, thus providing newfound inspiration.
Once you’ve taken your retro recording, pitch it up three or four semitones and process it. I’d use tape saturators, bit crushers (d16’s Decimort being my go-to) then retrigger the sample inside your sample down at the destination tempo.
See Alan Braxe explain how he made his hit Running/Intro (with Fred Falke) all inside the SP-1200 (notice the Alesis 3630 in the background too!):
Envelope filters
Envelope Filters are your friend. Sync’d LFO and envelope triggered filters can really give your samples some extra pumping. Place it on your master or channel bus and experiment with a gain plug-in placed before the filter. Ensure you limit anything that comes out the other end as high resonance can really squeal.
The key to good filter disco is… you guessed it: the filter. Most modern filers allow careful modulation of the parameters. Here’s an example that started out life as a bounced drum loop, recorded bass, guitar and MIDI synth-brass. While there’s nothing wrong with it, it doesn’t scream French House to me:
Using the excellent (free) Ohm Force’s Frohmage and sadly now retired CamelPhat by Apple-aquired Camel Audio, as well as various vintage compressors and EQ, we made something a little crunchier:
Then with a healthy bit of chopping and pitching, the finished sample:
Drum Grooves
Grooves are key to convincing house music. Programming sixteenth note hi-hats and snare fills isn’t enough. There are plenty of decent groove templates from famous drum machines easily available such as MPC and SP1200. Use a heavier swing than you anticipate and then dial the effect back for best results.
Your favourite records are probably not programmed straight 1/16th notes. The best drum machines and sequenced samplers had different swing and shuffle templates built in. Ableton makes it incredibly easy to trial these with ease. Here’s a fairly boring TR-909 loop:
By using some of the in-built grooves in Ableton Live we can achieve something with more swing and movement. Here’s one of the MPC swing templates:
And here’s one using an SP1200 groove:
Bass Programming
When programming bass the key to a good groove is not only syncopation but also changing note lengths. Having short, sharp notes can add a percussive feel to your loop similar to a bass player muting the strings on beats 2 and 4. A mixture of short and long notes really adds a natural feel. Consider using legato monophonic when programming bass lines too.
There are a couple of tips I use to try and add something else into the bass programming.
Syncopate it as much as necessary but no more. Groove is about balance. If you offset every note to rub against a simple drum groove it will loose the impact. A healthy amount of predictable rhythmic interplay contrasts with some accented weaker beats to give you an awesome groove.
Stick to your pentatonic scale. You’d be amazed how effective and rewarding a simple major or minor pentatonic scale can be when writing bass parts. Of course if there’s non-diatonic harmony or a chromatic passage then go for it, but as a foundation the pentatonic scale can yield amazing results.
Mix note durations. Particularly when programming with 1/16th notes, it can be easy to just draw note lengths all the same duration. Mix up the duration of note lengths – shorter notes will feel almost percussive and can accent a snare hit or act almost like a delay.
Use monophonic voice allocation. Bass parts are normally monophonic, and for good reason. Ensure you’re familiar with your synths legato or retrigger functionality. Using retrigger will ensure all envelope retrigger regardless of note overlap where as legato will not cause this. Similarly experiment with a small amount of glide/portamento.
Pack Details
Buy Sample Magic French House 2
Download Contains:
- 850 x 24-bit Wav files
- 630 x Apple Loops
- 630 x Rex2 files
- 155 x MIDI files
- 6 x Ableton Live 10 Audio FX Racks
Drum Hits:
- 21 x Claps
- 17 x Cymbals
- 53 x Hats
- 52 x Kicks
- 23 x Percussion
- 26 x Snares
- 13 x Toms
- 5 x Custom Kits for Maschine 2, Battery 4, Kong, EXS24 , FPC and Ableton Drum Rack
- 7 x Sampler Formats for Kontakt, NN-XT, EXS24 and Ableton Drum Rack
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