From The Vault - FREE sample pack

[Hades]

my dearest cunts,

I'll try to keep this as short as possible...
(which will always be a hard thing for me, as most of you no doubt know by now...)

from (roughly) september 2015 to september 2016, my SC page got quite a few plays,
(10k plus to be more exact, 8k in the last year alone)
of which at least 80% came from this lovely part of the internet that I truly consider to be my home forum-wise,
so yeah, as a small token of my gratitude, I decided to give something back in return...

So I built an Ableton Live pack containing 3 parts :

1. Approx. 70 audio clips (basses, leads, pads, textures, rhythmic stuff and some field recordings)
I've always saved tons of clips over the years,
clips that I've recorded but that I didn't immediately use in any of my projects,
so I have a massive clip library on my HD.
In the past few weeks, I've gone through all of them,
and I've made a selection just for you cunts.


2. I also went through my extensive collection of kicks and selected approx. 50 of them.
Some of those were sampled from my drum computers, others were totally made from scratch.
I ran all of them through my Midas EQ and also used its gain to slightly add more punch/saturation to them.


3. As a final extra I added about 15 presets I made for Ableton's "Analog" VST a few years back.
Some basses, some leads, and (obviously, you know me) some pads.
All of these were totally made from scratch,
and are built into an instrument rack with the macro knobs assigned to the most practical parameters (in my opinion).
No external FX were used to build these racks, just the native Live stuff.


Now,
I will briefly get into detail about these parts separately asap,
but I am currently looking for a site to host (or "upload", or whatever you wanna call it) an approx. 435Mb file.
I don't want to use wetransfer because it takes ages to upload from here,
and I want to keep it online longer than just 14 days (or whatever the time period is that it usually stays online with wetransfer).

So if any of you cunts have a proper suggestion as to what (reliable !!!) site I could use for hosting this, I'd love to hear it,
because right now it's the only thing stopping me from sending out this Live pack to some of you cunts

There's only 1 small thing I'd like to ask in return...
Relax, even if it's taken me approx. a whole week to prepare this pack,
and many many more days when I was recording these clips and programming these patches,
and of course all the cash I ever spent on some of the vintage gear used to make this pack,
I do NOT want your money.

But... as most of us here, I can always do with a little free publicity.

So, all I ask in order for me to send you this live pack,
is to simply repost one of my tracks.
I've recently started a new job that takes up a massive part of my time, and I don't think I'll be adding any new content to my SC page any time soon,
so yeah, just a simple repost of 1 of my tracks is enough.
I can then see your repost from my SC page (that's one the reasons you pay to have that star behind your name),
and I can then send you the download link via an SC PM.

Let's be honest : if you want, you can be a total cunt and just repost one of my tracks and take it off your page only a few days later,
I will never know (after I sent you the d/l link). So there's not much at stake anyway...
But I hope I can trust you guys (and girl, yeah yeah Stace, thinking of you ) to play this at least a little fair,
and also not distribute any of the content for profit, nor put your name on my stuff or whatever.

This is NOT about making a profit, this is about giving something back,
and I truly hope some of you talented fucks out there will do something wonderful with some of the sounds I've selected in this pack.
Because let's make this clear : you can do whatever you want with all of these clips/kicks/presets musically wise.
If you make a hit record with some of its content, all the more power to you !
Just don't be selling it off somewhere, because that would be a total shame (and you'd prove yourself to be a total cunt).

So yeah, any suggestions to a good and reliable hosting site to upload this ??

I'm really eager to start sharing this and hopefully hear some of the stuff you folks can do with this.

(more info on the separate parts will follow in other posts)

[Planar]

Good stuff. Nice of you to give something to those of us who have to read these long ass posts

You could host it on a public dropbox folder. Or (less privately) via Bandcamp?

[Hades]

Good stuff. Nice of you to give something to those of us who have to read these long ass posts

I'm pretty much shortening my posts nowadays, if you havent noticed...

You could host it on a public dropbox folder. Or (less privately) via Bandcamp?

not a bad idea but it sounds like it's a little over-complicated.
I just want to upload it to one of these "whatever" sites,
and when I see someone has reposted one of my tracks on their SC page, I send them the d/l link.

simple as fuck and practical, really.

[zukenbauer]

Nice, cant wait to hear those kicks and field recs..

[Hades]

mr ekwipt, thank you for that link,
I just deleted your post since the site looks exactly what I'm looking for and it's uploading now and I don't want people to be able to just find it by looking on that site.

[jacksonick]

Nice one. Thank you

[Hades]

ok, again, I'll try to keep it short, but I do find the pack needs a few words of explanation, which I'll try to write down in 2 or 3 posts.
It's basically just some random thoughts I wrote down while composing this pack :

1. as some of you know, I've built up quite a nice studio over the years. NONE of that matters,
you can perfectly make music with just a laptop if you are willing to put in the hours,
but I'd still like to mention some of the gear that I used, because in some clips it's extremely obvious :

HW :
*Roland SH-101
*Roland TB-303
*Kawai K5000r (additive synth)
*Ensoniq Fizmo (wavetable)
*Moog Mother-32
*Alesis Andromeda
...

SW :
a few soft synths like Alchemy, Absynth, and a certain softsynth that I totally adore...
and of course quite a few FX plugins like the Soundtoys or Fabfilter stuff.
...

FX :
*TC Electronic Fireworx
*Eventide H8000fw
*OTO Biscuit
...


--------------

2. The titles of the clips are kind of little jokes or tips to remind me which gear I used to record that clip.

3. I've gone through every clip and made sure the levels are not set too high. I don't want any clipping going on.
So if you have the feeling some of these clips sound too quiet, just fucking turn up the volume.
Or if you can't get them to sound loud enough, just resample them ffs.

4. Some textures are more like pads or vice versa. And maybe some leads are more in the bass department or vice versa.
I just named them according to the category I filed them under in my clip library. It's just a name, and we all know it's some times hard in our world with all this overlap in sound.

5. I've tried to make loops from 90% of my audio clips. However, once in a while a good loop just wasn't possible, so I tried to make one and left you with the original recording
(so no "crop clip" was done), so you can still try to make a better loop, or just try to make a totally different loop. Especially with pads and textures I tend to record really long clips, so yeah, have fun... If you really can't seem to make a good loop, just load it up in simpler or sampler and use the crossfading options.

6. Most clips are in "complex" mode, because that gives the most faithful reproduction of melodic content afaik.
The only exception to this are the kick clips, which are obviously in "beat" mode. But once in a while, there are 2 or 3 clips that just sounded better in "beat" mode, so I left them in that mode on purpose.

7. I think it goes without saying my strong point has always been pads and textures, so obviously this department is bigger than the rest of the pack.
I had the Live pack tested by folks and someone told me he missed some percussion loops. My answer to that is that I simply suck at that anyway, so why bother to include them.
I prefer to play out what I'm good at.

[1nfinitezer0]

I was gonna offer to host it on my dropbox, but it sounds like you have it covered. Looking forward to checking it out! I've always liked your sound design, and I love having stuff from the community in my tool kit

[Hades]

8. There's 49 kick loops in the pack. 19 were sampled off my old Airbase99 years ago.
30 were designed from total scratch using the Waldorf attack during some boring night shifts a while ago.
Like I said above : I ran all my kicks through my Midas mixer and used the EQ and the gain to spice them up a little.
Please pay attention : there was NO compression used on any of these kicks, I leave that up to you.
Also, pretty much all of my kicks have quite some high frequency content to make them cut through better in a mix.
This is not an accident, it's simply a fact that it's a lot harder to add extra high content than it is to just cut off what you don't want.
I've even made it easy for some of you lazy fuckers by making 4 measure sized clips of my kicks, so they are instantly ready to be used in any of your tracks.
Each of these hits have a slightly different velocity (though I did use the same MIDI clip for all of them),
so if that bothers you, just take out one hit and load it up in simpler or sampler, you ungrateful cunt !

9. My Analog presets were all programmed while I played them on my XV88, which means I did my ultra-best to make them sound as good as possible over the full 88 key range.
Obviously, this doesn't work for all sounds, and as a rule of thumb, it's better to have in mind that the "sweet spot" of lead or bass sounds is usually in the middle of your keyboard,
that is if you happen to have any decently sized set of keys. Or to put it simple : usually between C2 and C5.

10. Please have a look at the "info text" for my Analog presets. They contain a brief description with extra tips on how the sound was programmed and what works best when you turn the macro knobs.

[Hades]

Ok, apart from that, the pack is uploading to a cloud site right now.

Like I said, all you have to do is repost one of my tracks.
It might be the most practical if you send me a short PM (through SC) after you did this, and I'll reply with the d/l link.
Please be aware that with my current new job, I have almost NO free time at the moment, so I do not check my mails or SC messages every day.
If I happen to forget you, just send me another PM. It's most definitely not done on purpose.

Like I said above : please do NOT distribute any of the content of this pack anywhere online.
It's all for free, but that doesn't mean I appreciate people just sending it around without the small effort I ask in return.

and last but not least :
it goes without saying that I'd love to hear any kind of track that uses any part of this Live pack,
so feel free to post links as a reply in this topic if you ever used any of its content in one of your tracks.

as soon as it's uploaded, I'll post a reply saying it's good to go. (will probably be tomorrow, only at 25% now)

have fun folks, and THANK YOU once again.
This one is all for you to use and abuse.

[Hades]

ok, the sample pack (+ Analog presets) comes in the form of an Ableton Live pack,
so for those of you who don't know this :
all you gotta do is download it and if you click on the file after the download, it should install itself.

The file size is 435,2Mb

Contents :

*19 Jomox kicks
*30 Waldorf kicks
*12 bass loops
*8 lead loops
*11 rhythmical loops
*14 pads
*13 textures/FX
*11 field recordings

and for the Analog presets part :

*6x bass
*4x lead
*5x pad

If you don't happen to have Analog, the pack should just install itself fine (afaik) but Live will just tell you it can't find back this plugin.
This should not be a problem at all.

I've had people download it and test it and I heard no complaints at all,
but of course, I can't really test it out myself since it was created on my setup here.
So yeah, if any trouble, do let me know, but I doubt I'll be able to help you very much.
I don't exactly have time for "support" and please remember this is totally free.
But I honestly don't think this should give any trouble, Live packs are a simple way to distribute Live sets,
and I've used this format for years to send projects back and forth to others for collabs.

[Hades]

ok, the file has just finished uploading,
so yeah, to anyone who is interested :
you know the (simple) rules on how to get the link,
and have fun

[wouterdewitte]

excellent Tom! thanks a lot...
Maybe Subset can run a small competition on tracks made with the sample pack

does it matter which sc page of yours we use.. Hades or Tom Hades?

[Hades]

excellent Tom! thanks a lot...
Maybe Subset can run a small competition on tracks made with the sample pack

does it matter which sc page of yours we use.. Hades or Tom Hades?

man, you know very well I have totally nothing to do with Tom Hades except that we have our first name in common and live in the same region of this fucked up country.

I think it's pretty obvious the man is way above my level production-wise,
and makes music that isn't exactly my cup of tea.

so to anyone who is in doubt,
here's my SC page :

https://soundcloud.com/hades

repost a track and send me a PM and you get the link.

[ekwipt]

mr ekwipt, thank you for that link,
I just deleted your post since the site looks exactly what I'm looking for and it's uploading now and I don't want people to be able to just find it by looking on that site.

No probs

[Hades]

mr ekwipt, thank you for that link,
I just deleted your post since the site looks exactly what I'm looking for and it's uploading now and I don't want people to be able to just find it by looking on that site.

No probs

one more question mr ekwipt,
if I understand that site properly, you can't give folks a direct d/l link, correct ?
It seems I have to add people's email to my list of contacts and then they can access the file (or any future files I would add there).
(a bit like dropbox really, but with a lot bigger hosting capability)
this is a bit unfortunate as I would have preferred to send a direct d/l link out to people,
but if that's not an option, so be it.

At the moment I have sent out PM's via SC to all the people who have reposted one of my tracks up till now
(not sure if you were one of those or not, mr ekwipt, I hope you were),
asking them for an email address so they can access the Live pack.
If the cloud site would not properly work for folks, I can then still decide to send it via wetransfer,
which is a perfect site for things like that and is extremely reliable, it's just a little more work from my side of things.

[ekwipt]

no there is a direct link as well, you send it with the decrypt key or not (easier to just send with)

Click on your cloud drive until you get to the file

Click on drop down menu (far right)

Click update Link (silly way to name it)

Copy link with key

[Hades]

no there is a direct link as well, you send it with the decrypt key or not (easier to just send with)

Click on your cloud drive until you get to the file

Click on drop down menu (far right)

Click update Link (silly way to name it)

Copy link with key

ok, I just sent out the link I got following your instructions to anyone I just sent out a PM to (that's including you mr ekwipt)
so please folks, do let me know if the d/l link works.

[Alume]

Nice one man.

[terryfalafel]

Big up Hades. Nice idea

Hope all is well with you