The story
I decided to participate the Global Swarm project by submitting recordings of me hitting a light bulb. I then thought that it would be lovely to submit those recordings as a separate sample pack, so I grabbed a few of the recorded hits, as well as the “tremolo” recording and made 3 separate patches out of those:
– Hits is exactly that, individual hits on the light bulb. There are 2 dynamic layers and 4 Round Robins for each of said layers
– Tremolo is just the recording of me hitting the light bulb quickly with a couple of fingers
– Pad is a combination of a couple of the hits samples, which then were time-stretched.
I hope this simple pack will be able to illuminate your compositions.
Reviews for Light Bulb
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
A bright pad and swarmish hits!
This is a fantastic instrument by Marco, that sounds incredible by itself, which also gives a small glimpse on how complex the Global Swarm project is! Inside this very small package you will find 3 different patches supported by both DecentSample and Kontakt, but it has to be mentioned that the Kontakt patches offer more settings, such as distortion knobs and a gate sequencer for the pad patch!
Speaking of the pad, it sounds absolutely lovely, with a very warm and wholesome character to it. What might seem more interesting though is the percussive tremolo patch, which is based on fast hits with a soft mallet type of sound. In case you use Kontakt, you can even try running both at once, resulting in a very ambient and abstract texture that might take you to places.
Last but not least, there is a single hits patch, with the attack and release of it being a little short for my taste, as a tiny background noise comes and cuts away relatively fast. This can be almost eliminated by bringing down the filter just a little bit, and adding some reverb, which sounds absolutely fantastic on this patch.
As a graphics designer, I couldn't help but notice the vertically distorted lightbulb on the center of the background (DS), but this doesn't really affect anything.
Overall it's a lovely instrument with a well defined character in all cases, and I am sure it can be inspiring no matter the platform.
Huge attention to detail!
At last! Someone hitting something that isn't metallic! Well, that was my first thought. My second thought was more a reaction to 2 dynamic/velocity layers and 4 round-robins: Ooooooh!
I'm very impressed at anyone who takes the time to do multiple dynamic/velocity layers, particularly combined with 4 round-robins (even if it does break the 'odd number' rule (for sampling - in competitive sports, you deliberately go for even numbers! The world is truly a strange place...). I suspect that recording yourself hitting a light bulb is something that you should do on your own in a place where no-one is going to see you!
There are three .dspresets in the sample pack. I recommend that you listen to them in this order: Hits, Tremolo, Pads.
Hits. Just the raw hits. Nice, short sounds that are difficult to categorise. I was expecting glassy timbres, but my ears told me that some registers were metallic, some almost woody, and others I just lacked the words for. I did feel that maybe two dynamic/velocity layers was not enough, but I do appreciate the difficulties of hitting something dynamically repeatedly and consistently!
Tremolo. More a 'Swarm' than a tremolo, but this is more than just looping the sample, this is 10 seconds of random triggering, and it sounds sooo very much better because of it. Previously, I would have just looped a hit and maybe played a few in parallel, but I now know better! With some reverb, and ping-pong delay, there you are in ambient lands...
Pads. The stand-out for me, maybe because of the astonishing transformation that time-stretching and smearing makes to all of those hits. What you get is a smooth, glorious, heart-breaking pad sound that sounds like it cost a lot of money. Me being me, I would probably ruin it by adding chorus and detuning, and swamping it in reverb, but you can't help some people.
The UI varies slightly depending on the type of sound - so the 'Hits' don't have any envelope control, for obvious reasons. Again, this is something that I would probably have got wrong... I'm learning a lot today! But the low-pass filter has a 'Tone' cutoff frequency control as well as a Resonance control, which broadens the control that you have over the timbre. The use of delay is good for the Hits and the Tremolo, but I struggled to hear it on the Pads, which is where I expected it to provide smearing. Curious.
In summary, then, three very different timbres from the same source. My favourite has to be the 'Pad' sound, but the 'Tremolo' is an unusual swarm generator that would work well in combination with other swarm generators, perhaps? I do like samples where people have explored the edges of sampling, and this is arguably beyond some edges, and so much the better for it. Nice, very nice!
