Roland TR-505 drum machine for sale on eBay. I'd love to buy this myself but I currently don't have the funds to buy new gear at the moment so I said that I'd post a link up here on Voltage-Controlled.
Description from the eBay auction:
"It has been stored for a few years now, so I am looking to sell. When I first acquired it, some of the pads were sticky, and the battery contacts were fairly corroded. I therefore set about dismantling, cleaning, and getting it back into full working order. The result is a fully-working machine, with a few cosmetic scratches (which can be expected from a 25 year old Roland) and it will work from batteries (contacts cleaned up well) as well as from the optional power supply socket. It has been a pleasure to own this machine of the classic Roland TR series, but I'm saving up for my current photographic hobby hence the sale. This will also be sold with the original manual, although the manual is available for free download from Roland."
If you're interested in buying the 505 please head over to the eBay auction via this link.
The machine will be up for auction until March 2nd, 2012 (15:57 GMT)
If you have any further questions then please get in contact with @JohndMcCormick on Twitter or Via the eBay seller page.
Stochastik Drum Machine for iPad is now available in the iOS AppStore. The app lets you use a probability engine to program your beats, allowing you to create dynamic rhythm patterns and endless variation to to your drum loops.
Say goodbye to boring, repetitive drum loops and welcome a little randomness into your life.
The best thing about this app is obviously the probability engine. You can program a simple straight forward drum pattern into this thing and then use the probability engine to add a subtle variation to a drum part (say the hi-hats). This helps to give the beat that evolving feeling without making it sound completely random. That's not saying that it can't do random, if you set all of the steps to a low probability then this awesome little drum app will spit out a constantly evolving drum pattern (perfect for genres such as IDM).
I love how useful this thing is for fills and subtle changes. Say you're programming the drums for your new track but don't want to use that same loop all the way through the track. You want subtle variations to a snare fill or maybe that odd bit of percussion randomly coming in and out to keep your listeners on their toes. To program all of these little surprises by hand can take hours but if you program your beats on your iPad with Stochastik you could get this same effect in minutes, seconds even.
Of course the probability engine isn't the only thing that this app does well. It's packed with over a thousand high quality drum samples that can make an awesome addition to almost any genre of music that you can think of. Programming drum parts in Stochastik is really simple too, so even if you're not too familiar with programming drums then it should be pretty easy to learn how to use this thing. The app also has background audio, audio copy and WIST support meaning that you can wirelessly sync it with other iOS devices.
If you're taking your music seriously then you might want to use your own drum sounds or maybe even a hardware drum machine. At the moment Stochastik doesn't yet support MIDI in and out. But fear not, this will be included in the first major update to the app. Also that update will include other features such as multi channel exporting of drum sounds and mute/solo for each drum part.
All in all this is a solid drum machine app that not only offers you high quality sounds and simple programming but it also offers a truly inspirational way of programming beats and coming up with ideas. In fact I'll go as far to say that it's one of the best iOS music apps that I've seen in ages.
Here I've uploaded a video of my playing around with Stochastik, showing of a quick D&B pattern and an over the top mad glitch sequence.
Wave Alchemy has announced the release of their new sample pack SFX Collection 02, a collection of samples geared towards cutting edge dance music, cinematic sound design and game audio.
The pack contains 826 royalty free sound effects samples.
Here's a list of the kit that was used to create the sample library:
Roland Jupiter 8
Korg MS-20
Future Retro XS
Arp Odyssey
Oberheim OB8
Nord 3
Moog Voyager + CV Expanders / Moogerfoogers
Access Virus TI
Schippmann Ebbe und Flut
Oto Machines Biscuit
Eventide DSP-7000
Eventide DSP-4500
Eventide H3000
GRM Tools V3
Cecilia Csound
Soundtoys Native Bundle
NI Reaktor
Metasynth
API Preamps & Compressors
Empirical Labs Fatso
Elysia Xpressor
Thermionic Culture Vulture
Additional equipment for Foley recording / live sound
If you've watched the video that I posted on youtube of me creating a beat with the iElectribe drum machine for the iPad you'll have probably noticed that I had a custom background image on my copy of the app.
This is a really simple feature in the app and it's really easy to do. I've had a few people ask me how it's done so I thought I'd do a short screen cap video of me changing the boring red background to something a little cooler.
As you'll see this is a fairly simple feature. But this is here just in case. You know.
The folks over at Dubspot have uploaded their second tutorial video on Moog's io for the iPad. This video takes you a bit deeper into what sounds are possible with this awesome little synth.
I posted the first Dubspot Animoog turorial back in January. If you missed it click here and watch it.
Rhythm Studio has just been updated to version 1.06 which includes a few cool updates including a brand new synth for us to play around with. Rhythm Studio is a pretty cool little app, it's sort of like a toolbox of synths, drum machines and effects for the iPad.
The latest addition to the line up of synths is Phoenix. Phoenix replicates that classic supersaw sound from the legendary Roland JP-8000.
Rhythm Studio also included support for Korg's WIST technology in this update. This allows you to wirelessly sync Rhythm Studio with other iOS devices running compatible apps. WIST seems to be becoming the standard in wireless syncing on the iPad so there's no sjuppurise that this was included.
Background audio has been included in this update and also song sharing over Bluetooth.
Pulse Code have been quite regular with their updates to Rhythm Studio, to be honest it's good to see an app that gets updated this regularly with so many new features. Lets hope they continue to add more devices and keep making this better.
For this free sample pack I've been messing around with the analog modules from Reason's Kong drum machine. As I said in my last post, I use Kong for all of my drums when producing music.
This free sample pack contains:
4 one shot kicks samples
4 one shot snares samples
4 one shot hi-hats samples
4 one shot percussion samples
6 bonus loops
All the samples were made using the Kong drum machine and further processed with various VSTs in Ableton live.
All the samples that are available here on Voltage-Controlled are available completely free of charge. They are also royalty free, which means that you can use them in any creative protect (commercial or non-commercial) without having to clear them.
Mattias Häggström Gerdt from Propellerheads software shows you how to create some cool drum sounds using the tone and noise generators in Kong. I use Kong for most of my drums when producing both music and samples. It's a great tool for beat creation and coming up with some original sounds to use in your projects.
The Korg iMS20 was the first app that I ever installed on my iPad. I love the Korg apps (even if they are a little on the expensive side), they just sound completely awesome.
Now, the iMS20 might seem a little confusing at first but once you get into it, the possibilities of this thing are amazing. Don't be too put off by the semi-modular patch bay or the analog style sequencer, a little knowledge of analog synthesis will help a lot but to be fair it's pretty easy to pick up.
Here's a short screen cap video of me making a pretty simple dubstep style bass sound & showing off the sound of this brilliant synthesiser.
The Korg iElectribe is a beast of a drum machine. It was the first app that I brought for my iPad but for some reason I've never really got around to uploading anything about it on Voltage-Controlled.
Anyway, here's a short video of me constructing a simple drum beat using the iElectribe, I love the sound of this app.
I've also uploaded some iElectribe samples for you lot. It's only a small pack, it contains 8 one shot drum hits from the custom drum kit I used in the video.
