The story
This is a harsh but fair online review of the 80’s Yamaha PortaSound PSS-30 mini keyboard:
“This is about as toy as they come. It sounds pretty bad. Unfortunately it has no headphone jack so it is hard to record clean audio from it.”
OK… Challenge accepted!
For this sampling adventure, I decided to use the “coprophagy method”. All will become clear…
First off, I created individual instruments from the PSS-30’s 5 sustained sounds, micing the tiny speaker with a trusty SM57.
I then created five new instruments by re-sampling the above, going through my new splosh box of choice, the awesome Neon Egg Planetarium 2 to add warm and grainy modulated analog reverb and delay.
Finally, I created the MEGAPORTAPAD audio files from a crazy filter-swept pan-fest of a mix in Logic, using the five instruments from the previous step playing notes in unison.
Softly played keys will have a long gentle swell and stronger notes have a bit more filtery fizz.
Reviews for MEGAPORTAPAD
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
ASAP Rocky
This really reminds me of something you would hear in ASAP rockys older music. Most of that music was produced by clams casino and alot of his pad textures sounded very similar to this. Almost vocal like but also synthy, very dreamy and modulated, chill but still has some energy. This is a really awesome sound. The GUI gives you alot of control to either have work kind of like a keys patch or like a pad if you pull the attack back.
Awesome kinda retro character
This pad is sampled extremely well, and the featured sound is awesome as well. It is wet by default, but you can still get tons of texture and definition. You can get both an ambient pad sound and a more of a lead-pluck by adjusting the attack and release appropriately. It also has a very subtle ping-pong effect that fills the stereo field. Nice to see this available for DecentSampler!
Gentle, sweet vocal pad
This is a really cool vocal pad. there's something about the graniness of the sound that's very attractive. It's not noisy, it's just kind of rough. I love the ability to shorten the attack and release. Sometimes the long attack is built into the samples and there's nothing you can do about it, but here you can make a lot of changes, so it's very playable and very usable. This is an excellent little library!
