Sensory Percussion comes with rich sound-design tools: built-in samplers, effects, and controllers, but you can also use it as an expressive controller for just about anything by sending MIDI to 3rd-party software, hardware synths, lights, etc.

You can use a MIDI-bus to trigger drum racks in Ableton, control effects, almost any parameter, really.

There are lots of ways to program sending MIDI to Ableton depending on what you want to achieve, but the template linked below is an example of triggering drum racks and controlling macro knobs (mapped to effects) with CC messages from Sensory Percussion.

Click here to get the template!

The template is meant to be an example of some useful mappings from Sensory Percussion into Ableton Live. There are sounds and effects from Ableton’s Core Library assigned to the drum racks, but these elements can be “hot-swapped,” deleted, or otherwise substituted out for new sounds and effects.

Keep in mind that this is a completely different workflow from using the Sunhouse Audio Streamer plugin in Ableton to record audio from Sensory Percussion (read more about that here).

Setup

We tried to make this template as “plug-and-play” as possible for you to set up. Once you’ve opened up both the Sensory Percussion set and Ableton session all you have to do is create/select an IAC Bus as your output for Sensory Percussion, and as your input for Ableton.

Exploring the mappings

The notes from Sensory Percussion are simply their default (C1 — A1) and those correspond to the sounds in the Ableton drum racks, but each channel is also sending eight CC knobs to the Macro knobs on the Instrument Racks in Ableton.

The CC knobs in Sensory Percussion are assigned to the Instrument Rack Macro Knobs on each channel in Live. The first two macro knobs are controlled by velocity and speed, the next three are governed by timbre (for Drums 1, 2, and 3 there are Center-to-Edge, Rim Shoulder-to-Rim Tip, Rimshot Center-to-Rimshot Edge, and Edge-to-Damped Edge Macro knobs, and for Drum 4 there is Open-to-Closed, Rim Shoulder-to-Rim Tip, Open-to-Rim Tip, and a Rim Tip velocity button). The final two macro knobs on each channel respond to the velocity and speed of the whole kit.

You can see a list of all of the MIDI mappings by clicking on the MIDI button in the top right corner of Live.

You can add even more mappings from this view by selecting a parameter, paging over to Sensory Percussion, and then manipulating a knob to trigger a MIDI message: you’ll see your new mapping appear in the list on the left of the screen.

Each parameter that is being controlled by a Macro has a green dot next to it — you can right click the parameter to see what it is mapped to and you can map it to something else if you want.

You can also see a list of all internal control mappings of each drum or instrument rack by selecting the map button. You can change the range of each parameter mapping here, as well.

Most of the mappings are straightforward and utilize similar techniques that we use inside Sensory Percussion when we design our internal presets, but in this template those techniques are transposed to the Ableton Live environment.

The one mapping that may be hard to follow is we have assigned the Rim Tip of Drum 4 (CC knob 5 on channel 4) to control the chain selector of each instrument rack.

In Sensory Percussion we have set the controller assigned to that knob to toggle button mode so that it switches between 0 and 127 every time it is activated. There are two drum racks encapsulated in the instrument rack on each channel in the template so the chain selector toggles between each drum rack when you strike the rim tip of Drum 4.

You can disable this behavior in a number of ways, but it might be easiest just to delete any drum racks you don’t wish to play and then expand the blue-purple bar in the chain selector to full range.

If you want to layer in a Sensory Percussion kit, it’s as easy as copying the MIDI-to-Ableton-Template kit and “pasting-only-midi” over a kit in Sensory. All of the CC and note mappings will be pasted over the new kit.

Conclusion

Use this template to control the sounds of Ableton with Sensory Percussion and explore mapping MIDI to parameters. Feel free to share any cool alterations to this template or other templates you have created in the forum.

Using MIDI to Control Ableton Live with Sensory Percussion (plus free template) was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Gordian Plexus is a new sound pack, free for Sensory Percussion users. It’s a cold, dark, and complicated sound-world with grainy, saturated tonal and percussive sounds, doubled-up virtual acoustic drums, violin samples, garbled cassette effects, samples of dusty-wavetable synth tones, office sounds, and over 50 new kits that utilize new Sensory Percussion features and techniques.

Continue reading to learn about the recording process as well as the inner workings of the kits, and if you’re an SP user, you can grab it from the Sunhouse Downloads page.

The Recording Process

The first three folders (box of old analog sounds, Cassette Drums, and Cassette Synth Sounds) in Gordian Plexus were sourced by recording instrumental sounds onto cassettes — often with such a high amount of gain that it clipped the input to the cassette tape— and then recording the cassette back into the digital world, sometimes manipulating the speed of the cassette playback to distort the samples even further.

In folder, cold brew jug, there are sounds that we created by striking an upside-down-glass jug filled with various amounts of water. The jug has a particular kind of metal lid, so it sounds a little bit tabla-esq when the water swirls across the metal membrane after being struck.

The folders Double hat, Double snare, Double kick, and Double tom are what power many of the virtual acoustic drums and kits in this pack. One night we devised a recording session at Sunhouse HQ to record hits from the same type of drum at precisely the same time.

We close miked two hi-hats, two snare drums, two kick drums, and two toms, and then recorded them with pretty much the same method we use for all of our virtual acoustic kits: record each gesture (center, edge, damped, etc) at three velocity levels with five samples per each velocity level. Except this time we hit them simultaneously. Of course gestures like stick-shot and damped had to be recorded on each drum separately and then synced-up later, since they involve both of the drummer’s hands to produce.

The folder office sounds contains sounds mostly sourced from things we have around the office here at Sunhouse HQ. A can of grape soda, keyboard taps, and whiteboard markers, etc. But also our friendly office-extra-terrestrial (who lives inside a metal cabinet and handles a lot of our behind the scenes customer support) stepped up to the mic and recorded some of their natural vocal sounds and short songs in their native language.

The Senescent Symphonizer folder contains notes and sweeps from ten patches of a trusty synth a friend brought in one day. We found the sounds to be retro and delightful and they are featured in a number of the kits such as Plex Slag, Acedia, and Altocumulus.

Then one day we found a very old synthesizer with a noisy output. The synthesizer was extremely rudimentary, so we just recorded single notes of basic waveforms (sine, square, triangle, etc) and those sounds make up the sounds of the Synth Building Blocks folder. You can load up these sounds into the sampler and run them through Sensory Percussion effects to come up with interesting approximations of old wavetable synth patches. Virga, sYnth, FredXylo, spinWhistle, and dognap are examples of kits in Gordian Plexus that use this technique.

The violin sounds were recorded by Amy Atzmon in Michigan. We had her perform legato, vibrato, and pizzicato notes. In keeping with the aesthetic of the pack we then recorded the sounds of her violin onto cassette before recording them back into the computer. We included the clean samples, as well as the cassette-saturated ones in the pack.

The Kits

Caldera

Caldera is a pretty basic chord kit with some fun twists: Chords on drum 3 cycle and are toggle-pitched up/down an octave by striking the rim-tip of drum 1. There is a center-to-edge melody note overtop the chords on drum 3. Drum 2 is just a melody (notes are controlled by center-to-edge, but the whole drum is active so the rim is in play as well).

abyss

Abyss is also a chord kit, but this time the melody is on drum 3 and the chords are on drum 2. Notes on drum 3 cycle and are pitched with a center-to-edge controller. Striking the rim tip of drum 1 engages/disengages two of the samplers on drum 3 with higher notes.

Altocumulus

Altocumulus has synth contrabassoon melodies on drums 2 and 3. Like the other melodic kits, there is center-to-edge pitch mapping, but velocity controls note length.

cobbledSky, Acedia, splinesta, dognap,virga, spinWhistle, sYnth, FredXylo

These kits each have a four-voice harmony mapped to drum 3 (playing from center-to-edge will change the notes, full velocity hits will play the full chord, while semi-velocity hits will only play one or two voices of the chord). Drum 2 of these kits is a melody, while Drum 1 and Drum 4 are snare and kick mappings, respectively.

plex slag

This kit is essentially the Galactic Brine kit chill slag but with Gordian Plexus samples. To make this kit we used chill slag as a template, but erased all of the samples and added new ones. Also, there are chords on drum 3 of chill slag, but plex slag has just notes.

Derecho, crazed

These are fully tonal kits: drums 1, 2, 3, & 4 are all pitched to scales on a center-to-edge. The samples cycle like sequencers, using a technique we discovered while producing the Black Cat sound pack. These kits are cousins to Black Cat’s Fractal, Euclidean Rhythm, and Lasko.

C&C Cassette, Mid Satch C&C, Full Satch C&C, doubleDrums

These are the virtual acoustic kits. The C&C kits are powered by the samples from our first virtual acoustic recording session: we recorded those samples onto a cassette and back with three gain settings. The first kit has very little cassette saturation, but the other two are overblown. doubleDrums is made up of the double drum recording described in the Recording Process section above.

Acute Radiation Syndrome, Grape Bureau, BLOWN OUT CASSETTE, blown out 2

These kits are fully percussive (okay, Acute Radiation Syndrome is sort of tonal, but not really). They all play like classic Sensory Percussion kits: lots of timbral, velocity, and speed control.

fourVoiceSynths1, fourVoiceSynths2, 4 voice symphonizer 1, 4 voice symphonizer 2, 4 voice symphonizer 3, Violin VL, Violin_cass VL

These are fully tonal voice leading kits. Each tone in these kits is governed by a center-to-edge controller.

Every single drum follows the same rules that drum 3s of: cobbledSky, Acedia, splinesta, dognap, virga, spinWhistle, sYnth, FredXylo follow. There is some duplicate material from those kits, but we included those duplicates so that users can easily find and drag and drop these tonal drums into new kits. These fully tonal voice leading kits sound good when they are played as a kit, but the single drum mappings are mostly meant to be dragged and dropped into new kits (to be combined with other sounds).

violin-pizzicato, violin-legato, violin-vibrato, violin cassette-pizzicato, violin cassette-legato, violin-vibrato, synthDulcimer, synthEnglishHorn, synthContrabassoon, synthSax, synthPennyWhistle, synthWoodwinds, synthGtr, selesta, sacrosanct, seraphin, synthXylo, steel, splectrum, spinet

These are single voice fully tonal kits. They include tonal material from the synth building blocks folder or from the Senescent Symphonizer folder. They are included for the same reason as the four voice kits: for easy access for our users to drag and drop them into new kits. They sound good as full kits, but can also be dragged-and-dropped as single drums into new kits that could use some melody.

Caldera_no tones, dognap_no tonesPetrichor_no tones, sastruga_no tones, virga_no tones, spinWhistle_no tones, Altocumulus_no tones, Acedia_no tones, splinesta_no tones, abyss_no tones, glassyBeach_no tones, FredXylo_no tones, Acute Radiation Syndrome_no tones

These are the no tones variations of the tonal kits in Gordian Plexus. They are the same drum 1 and drum 4 of the original versions, but drums 2 and 3 are either original or borrowed from other non-tonal kits in Gordian Plexus.

Gordian Plexus, a dark moody sound pack for Sensory Percussion was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recording can sometimes be stressful — gear can act up or interact in weird ways with other gear. Here are six tips for recording into a DAW using the SP Audio Streamer so that your next recording session can go as smoothly as possible.

1. CPU Strain

In some cases for computers with slower CPUs and with i5 processors or older, you may simply be hitting a wall of CPU speed. In this case, use a sample rate of 44100, don’t go below 128 buffer size for SP, keep Ableton to 128 buffer size, keep effects in SP and plugins in Ableton to a minimum. The UI’s of both SP and Ableton add to CPU strain, so it may help to minimize SP and/or Ableton while recording.

2. Turn off “Automatic Graphics Switching” on MacOS

On Mac laptops with two graphics systems (i.e. comes with a discrete graphics card), you’ll want to make sure “Automatic graphics switching” is turned OFF. I’ve found this to make an immediate difference in reducing clicks and pops. Here’s an article on how to do this.

3. Plugin and DAW getting out of sync

If your recording sounds distorted in a more constant or rhythmic way, then this is not a CPU issue, but rather it means that the router plugin and SP have gotten out of sync (we hope to remove this issue, but it is why the plugin is still in Beta). To resolve this, close both SP and Ableton, then open SP and then Ableton in that order, and make sure their buffer sizes and sample rates are matched. Make sure you monitor the sound coming through the routing plugin before you record that special take. If the audio sounds good, then it will remain that way as long as you don’t open or close SP or change audio settings in either. This issue is rare, but it can happen so just make sure it sounds right before pushing record.

4. ASIO on Windows does not let two softwares access the same audio device

If you are on a Windows computer, there is an unfortunate limitation for many Windows ASIO drivers when hosting two standalone softwares through the same audio device. So, on Windows, if you have both SP and Ableton connected to the same ASIO device, you’ll most likely get crackles and pops. If you just want to record SP and don’t need to have Ableton in the mix, then select a different audio device for Ableton (maybe the built-in device or use ASIO4ALL) and it should fix this issue. But this is a limitation if you want to perform with both running. Some companies have created drivers that support this fully (multi-client drivers), but most don’t. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that this is an issue for Focusrite drivers, so please, if you have this issue, reach out to Focusrite and complain as they will only respond to an issue if enough customers bring it to their attention. Here’s a forum discussion on the matter that includes some interfaces that do support this.

5. Old audio interfaces and low buffer sizes

Some interfaces are not as good as others and will not handle low buffer sizes well. Most new interfaces on the market are up to par and will work fine at small buffer sizes. But we have had issues with older interfaces and especially with Firewire connections. These days, you can get a pretty solid 4-pre interface for between $100 and $300. More expensive interfaces might have better features or be able to shave off a millisecond or two of latency, but the improvement is minimal for the costs when it comes to running SP.

6. Check your cables!

Every once in a while, a bad USB cable or port on your computer will cause weird issues. So, this is always a good thing to check when troubleshooting any issues. Try switching ports or swapping out cables.

6 Tips for Recording Sensory Percussion into a DAW using the SP Audio Streamer plugin was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The year is almost out, but we are happy to announce one last major update to Sensory Percussion — 1.6! This release brings some important improvements for on-stage performance, as well as plenty of bug fixes and improvements. Read on for the full details…

Kit transitions

This is one of the top-requested features. You can now set a transition mode for each kit in your set:

FX Tail-fade: Reverbs, delays, and flanger/phaser/choruses will complete their decay after you transition to the next kit.

Play-through: any looping samplers from the previous kit will continue to loop into the newly selected kit. FX tails will fade, as well.

Cutoff: The sounds from the first kit will abruptly stop when you select transition to a new kit.

Base Pack 2.0

We’ve updated all of the kits in the Base Pack (the sounds and kits that you get when you install Sensory Percussion) and added a new Demo Set with 10 kits that highlight some of the features that make Sensory Percussion great!

The 49 kits in the Base Pack have each been updated to sound best with all of the new features we’ve added since we first launched Sensory Percussion two and a half years ago. The software has really changed since then! We kept the general spirit of each kit but tightened them all up and added a few new kits such as:

Aries––100% tonal kit with layers of ethereal xylophone, marimba, and electric piano notes quantized to a scale with center-to-edge timbre control.

Analog Trap Control––analog drum machine sounds with classic Sensory Percussion control.

Also, we included over 400 previously unreleased samples spread throughout the 80s and 90s Drum Machines, Electro, Percussion Section, Worldly Sounds, and Yameen Allworld folders.

Welcome

We included a new splash screen to welcome new users the first time they open Sensory Percussion. Besides having useful links like the manual and tutorial videos, the new welcome screen also lets you set the behavior of the app when you open it. You can now choose between:

1. opening the splash screen
2. opening the last set
3. opening a new set

Making things easier to use and fix

It’s now easier to open Sensory Percussion set files (.sps) from within the library. Just right-click, and choose “open set”.

Want to start over in your training but don’t want to make a new model, now you can right-click a pad in training mode and “clear training on all pads”.

Other things we fixed

• fixed an issue with MIDI Output getting lost when CC’s are present
• fixed sampler voice stealing issue that caused clicks
• fixed issue with speed controller calculation — it’s now more exact
• fixed compatibility issues with MacOS Mojave

Sensory Percussion v1.6! was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This pack has over 3,000 samples and 33 original kits: from radio-ready virtual-acoustic and percussive kits to textural and tonal kits that utilize new Sensory Percussion features and techniques such as a center-to-edge technique based on Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass voice leading, as well as sampler cycles modeled after the classic sounds of 80s sequencers. Read on to learn about the recording process and kit building techniques for Black Cat.

The sound ingredients are all neatly contained in a folder named “Wobblies Instruments,” and are derived from:

• Thirteen synth, keyboard, pad, or lead sounds featuring chord progressions, and a full range of notes recorded at various velocities
• Four bass guitars featuring a full range of notes recorded at various velocities
• Black Cat Drums: Exhaustive recordings of kick and snare (both clean and saturated by a cassette player), field snare, congas, floor-tom, hi-hat, ride, and auxiliary percussion: all with ample timbral gestures and velocities to power hyper-realistic virtual acoustic models
• Verdigris Drums: Exhaustive recordings of snare (sampled with sticks and hot rods), hi-hat (with hot rods), conga, djembe, and a detuned floor-tom (played with a puffy mallet so it functions as a kick)
• Three drum machines: many single hits of classic-but-unique electronic percussive sounds

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka, Wobblies, is a global labor union that was a prominent political force in the early to mid-1900s. Their ideology and visual aesthetic influenced the making of this pack.

The Black Cat Kits

Geodesic Children

An aesthetic theme of the Wobblies is a geodesic globe that predates the one in Flushing Meadows Park, NYC (the park made famous by the 1964 World’s Fair).

The day that I recorded the tonal sounds that are featured predominantly on Drums 2 and 3 was the day the Thai Cave Children were rescued. Those sounds are quantized to a C Hungarian Minor scale and cycled to sound like an 80s sequencer. The pitched sounds are paired with an electronic snare and pitched-down acoustic kick.

Wobblies Dorian

Drum 3 in this kit makes use of the SATB voice-leading technique that we recently developed. Playing the drum from center-to-edge and hard-to-soft will create rich harmonies and melodies. The Wobblies Dorian drum is supported by vibey-drum-machine snare and kick on Drums 1 and 4, and a pitchy warm analog Drum 2.

chrysanthemum

This kit contains a chord progression played on a patch I designed and named chrono-synclastic — after chrono-synclastic infundibulum “which is defined in [Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan] as “those places … where all the different kinds of truths fit together.”

In the kit, chrysanthemum, the chord progression on Drum 3 goes: Em7, D, GMaj7/B, C add 9.

And the progression mapped to Drum 2 goes: D7, E7 FMaj7, G, G69, G, G69, G.

Striking the rim-tip of Drum 4 resets the cycles of both of the chordal samplers.

Fletcher Chords, Fletcher Notes

Ben Fletcher was an Black labor leader and an important member of the Wobblies. He was wrongfully convicted of treason along with 100 members of the Wobblies and sentenced to ten years in prison — he ultimately served three years before his sentence was commuted in 1922.

The kits, Fletcher Chords, and Fletcher Notes use sounds of an eclectic keyboard I designed and named after Ben Fletcher. It has a sharp attack of the tines that evolves into a heavenly sounding sustain and release. Fletcher Chords makes use of the day-drunk-sounding chord progression that goes: G, G7, Em, CMaj7, Eb, AbMaj7, Bb7, EbMaj7.

The kit is set up so that striking the center of Drum3 will play a chord and then advance to the next chord in the progression (using the next button). But if you hit the rim-tip of Drums 1, 2, 3, or 4 it will load up a specific chord — Drum 4 restarts the progression at G, Drum 1 navigates to G7, Drum 2 navigates to AbMaj7, and Drum 3 navigates to CMaj7.

maximalism

The kit, maximalism, makes use of a plethora synth notes sampled for Black Cat, Planetoid, as well as Galactic Brine (so this kit won’t load up correctly if you haven’t installed those packs). The 56 synth tones that power Drum3 of this kit are panned in samplers left and right and play in random order when you strike that drum.

Mother Jones

The timbre of the Mother Jones Horns reminds me of a time when Bill Clinton was President and I was a child watching a VHS tape of FernGully. The chord progression, which is mapped to Drum 3 goes: G, Bb, F, D, G, Bb, EbMaj7, D. I like this progression even if it is a bit hokey: I think it is in D all along, but I don’t have the theory chops to explain it.

Like the kit Fletcher Chords, the rim-tips of the drums navigate to different chords in the progression (but striking the center of Drum 3 will advance you straight through the progression). Hitting the rim of Drum 4 takes you to the tonic.

vacantBrane

vacantBrane uses notes from the tonal instruments in the Wobblies Instruments folder. The notes on Drum 3 are cycled in a unique way: with saw up and saw down LFOs mapped to the cntrl number boxes of the samplers. They create intriguing patterns that are independent of the tempo at which you play.

Fractal, Lasko, Euclidean Rhythm

These three kits are completely tonal — they contain no non-pitched elements whatsoever — and they are built with that aforementioned SATB voice leading technique, but on steroids!

Instead of having a single voice per sampler (like Wobblies Dorian and other SATB inspired kits) these kits have 13 or more cycled synthy samples per sampler. The resulting kits sound like classic sequencers and arpeggiators, but are controlled with the center-to-edge technique that allows for interesting harmonic textures.

slagCat, and labyrinthCat

I learned recently of a Sensory Percussion user who found an interesting way to make new kits: they started with a preset and simply removedall of our samples and replaced them with their own. The controllers, pad assignments, and effects all remained, but the raw sonic ingredients all changed. It reminded me of the Ship of Theseus paradox: if a ship has all of its component parts replaced over time — one-by-one — is it still the same ship?

I was inspired to make these two kits in the same way. For slagCat, I started with the popular Sensory Percussion kit chill slag (from the Galactic Brine pack) and then removed all of the samples and replaced them with samples from the Black Cat pack. For labyrinthCat, I started with Labyrinthine (also from Galactic Brine) and did the same thing.

sabotageCat

The Wobblies’ iconic Black Cat logo is also known as sabo-tabby. Drums 2 and 3 utilize the new voice leading technique with synth-horns and synth-choir sounds.

Welsh’s Synthesizer Cookbook by Fred Welsh has been a big influence on me recently, and I noticed that prescribes a very fast triangle LFO mapped to amplitude (but not very deep) in many of his patches. If you dissect this kit you’ll notice I did exactly that on the synthy-horns and choir samplers in this kit. It sounds wonderfully warbley-warm-and-nostalgic to me. Thanks, Fred!

orchid

orchid uses the same voice leading technique of kits like Wobblies Dorian, sabotageCat, Fractal, Lasko and Euclidean Rhythm, but with plucky poly-synth sounds mapped to Drum 2 and dreary horn-vocal composite sounds mapped to Drum 3. I again used the Fred Welsh triangle-wave-LFO technique on the amplitude of the samplers mapped to those drums.

Sophronia, greenLillian, and Pluto

Sophronia and greenLillian use tonal sounds from Verdigris (the pack-within-a-pack that powers the coffee-shop-esq-virtual acoustic kits and various drum machines). Strike the rim-tip of Drum 4 of greenLillian once to shift the warm orchestral chords (mapped to Drum 3) up or down a whole-step for a gospel style modulation.

Pluto uses some of the more triumphant chords and notes from the Plutonian Synth folder. Striking the rim-tip of Drum 1 sets both chordal samplers on Drum 2 and 3 to A7/C# and and Em7, respectively (a pretty cool starting point, I’d say).

Black Cat Acoustic, Cassette Cat, Black Cat Congas, Black Cat Cymbals, Field Kit, Bronze Disease, Green of Grey, Fungicide, and Chloroplast

These are the virtual acoustic kits that are built from two unique drum-sets we recorded here at Sunhouse HQ:

The drum sets, Black Cat Drums, and Verdigris Drums were recorded in three separate recording sessions. The first night we recorded the Congas, Field Snare, and Auxiliary Percussion of Black Cat.

For the congas: we recorded both a Quinto and Hembra by close miking the head and base of the drums. We also put a wooden board underneath the base of the drums in order to project a vibrant reflection. Tlacael performed bass tones, edge tones, muted tones & slaps, open tones, slaps, fingers, and heel/toe hits.

Like most of our virtual acoustic kits we recorded five layers of three velocities per gesture, but for the auxiliary percussion, we simply recorded a few different articulations of shaker and tambourine (including striking the conga with the tambourine)

For the field snare, I set up a makeshift booth in the corner by arranging sound paneling and rugs. I cranked up the tuning of the deep drum and muted it with my wallet. I recorded three zones of the head, two zones of rimshot, two zones of damped, two zones of damped rimshots, three zones of stick-on-rim, and cross stick.

At the next session I recorded the Black Cat Snare, Tom, Kick, Hi-Hat, and Ride. The kick, snare, and tom were recorded using similar methods to the field drum. But I further processed the kick and snare by recording them at distorted levels to a cassette tape (and then recording the cassette sounds back onto the computer).

On the third night, we recorded all of the sounds in the Coffee-Shop-esq Verdigris Drums folder: Conga, Djembe, Detuned Floor-Tom, Hi-Hat with hot rods, and a snare with both hot rods and sticks.

phazeCraze, Zaira, Ennead, toggleCat, Cyan Balloon, and Nitrosomonas

These final kits are made with the drum machine and acoustic drum recordings of this pack. They utilize classic Sensory techniques such as center-to-edge effects control, speed controllers that only react to buzz rolls, and velocity control phaser, flanger, or chorus.

Black Cat, a new Sensory Percussion Sound Pack was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For this month’s release we present to you Streetlab: a pack comprised of sounds provided to us by Josh Green (of Permanent Record Drums and a Sensory Percussion user), with additional sounds and kits produced by us here at Sunhouse HQ. It includes 419 original raw samples and 17 new kits. To record the gritty skateboard sounds, Josh partnered with Andrew Meador, a musician and skateboarder.

Recording process:

Andrew and Josh first went to the Chattanooga skatepark to capture the sounds of Andrew riding his skateboard on ramps and rails, and then they took the board to be recorded at a street spot. Initially they found that it was surprisingly challenging to capture a wide variety of sounds, because even vastly different tricks end up sounding similar when recorded. And so in their “Cambrian Explosion moment” they decided to go back to Josh’s drum studio and record samples using brushes and sticks to strike the grip-tape and other parts of the board. They focused on texture-on-texture sounds instead just different motions of the skateboard.

Their contribution to Streetlab is an exhaustive exploration of various types of decks, trucks, wheels, rails, and grinds, smashes, and crashes.

At Sunhouse, we recorded the chords, tones, and drum machine sounds in the “synths” folder included in the pack. The electronic sounds range from bubbly and cool to spidery and gritty.

Kit Descriptions:

Indy

While we always love it when our users to mix and match the preset drums of kits to make entirely new kits (and then of course to add their own sounds on top of them!), we often build kits as a thematic collection of four drums that were tweaked to sound best together.

But Indy (along with many of the kits in Streetlab) was initially made as four stand-alone drums, before those drums were combined and tweaked slightly to go better together. The result, we hope, is a cohesive kit that can be used as independent drums and mixed and matched with other kits. Try mixing and matching the drums from all of the non-tonal kits in this pack — we think you’ll like the result!

Indy is made entirely up of the skate sounds Josh recorded, and responds like a classic Sensory kit with center-to-edge pitch control of the samples mapped to the heads of the drums, and rim shoulder-to-rim tip control of the samplers mapped to most of the rims. The rim of Drum 3 has an exclamatory “Woo!” sound accompanied by the sound of a (presumably) successful skateboard landing.

McTwist

Play a stick-shot on Drum 3 of McTwist to toggle between two different hip-hop-style vocal samplers mapped to the head of the drum and pitched by center-to-edge controller. Drums 1 and 2 have cycling samplers filled with rocks smashing, skate-tape, and skate-trucks sounds.

Melon

Drum 2 of the kit, Melon, is a hi-hat emulation created with the skate sounds. We’ve found that it often sounds best to use mesh-heads when creating a hi-hat emulations, because acoustic toms don’t always blend well with trappy hi-hat sounds like the ones that are mapped to this drum. Play a buzz on Drum 2 and the hi-hat samples will pitch down an octave.

Body Jar

You’ll see in Drum 2 of Body Jar that “all blends” is turned on, but when you click on the active pads you might notice that all of the samplers are removed from blends except for those mapped to the center.

In this way you can have “one way” blending — the percussive cycles mapped to the center will respond proportionally to your playing across the entire drum, but the rim-tip-hi-hat sound, and the rimshot clap sound will only activate if you play those gestures.

Judo Air

Drums 1 and 3 of Judo Air are snare and percussion mappings, respectively, but like many of the kits in this pack are composed completely of skateboard sounds. The vocal sounds mapped to the head of Drum 2 are pitched to a 2-note scale (root and 4th) that slides up about an octave and a half as you play from center-to-edge. The vocal sampler on the rimshot are pitched by an LFO, while the the one on the rim tip responds to velocity (the harder you play, the higher up the sample is pitched). Drum 4 of this kit is a simple kick drum mapping of the drum machine kick sounds included in this pack.

Helipop

Helipop is a spacy kit with an intuitive feel. Drum 3 is essentially a sound FX drum: predictably unpredictable. LFO’s control pitch and reverse parameters in the samplers mapped to the center and edge of Drum 3, but you can be sure that you will get a relatively short, percussive sound when you strike the drum.

STREET

The kits, STREET is primarily made from single drum kits that Josh made shortly after recording the skateboard sounds. In most drums in STREET there are longer skating or vocal sounds mapped to the more deliberative gestures such as stickshot and damped.

No Comply

No Comply relies heavily on the drum machine sounds we recorded here at Sunhouse and added to the pack. Josh’s skateboard sounds are still mapped to rimshots on the drums of this kit, tying this kit thematically to the rest of the pack. The electronic hi-hat sounds on Drum 2 cycle in a pattern of five, which will give your 4/4 grooves a funky vibe.

Lien Air

We went a bit wild with the modulation effects on Drums 2 and 3 of Lien Air (hopefully tastefully so). The hi-hat sounds on Drum 2 to are processed through a flanger and then a phaser, and the tom sounds mapped to Drum 3 are processed through a phaser and then a flanger. The rate knob on all of the “SunMod FX in this kit is modulated by random LFOs, which is what makes the samples emanating from Drums 2 and 3 sound like they are a spinning coin on a table, occasionally spinning to a halt, but then magically ramping back up again.

Tail Devil

In creating Tail Devil, we further explored the flanger & phaser relationship that I described above in Lien Air. But instead of modulating the rate knobs like in Lien Air, Drums 2 and 3 of Tail Devil are processed through flangers and phasers with very slow, steady rates. This doesn’t cause the “coin-spinning” effect, but does allow you to tap into the slowly modulating rhythms produced by the slightly differing rates of the phasers and flangers.

Bubbler Chamber

Check out Drums 2 and 3 of Bubbler Chamber! It’s a new Sensory technique for sound separation within kits. Mapped to the shell pads of those drums are samplers with tonal sounds, but those shell pads are not active in this kit!

Never fear! Because on each drum there is a velocity controller mapped to the play button of those samplers which is sensitive to the entire drum if you play hard enough. That means you can play those drums anywhere to activate the chords (as long as you play intentionally hard), but still have other sounds assigned to active pads. It also has the added benefit of allowing you to add different pad effects to different sounds that are responsive to the same gesture or the entire drum.

Stalefish

Drum 3 of Stalefish has a chord progression that is split between the center and edge pads. There are 22 chords sequenced to the center pad, and just a three chord cadence on the edge pad. You can play through the airy chords by playing the center of the drum, and then play through the definitive cadence whenever you are ready to by striking the edge three times.

Rocket Air

The filthy distorted chords mapped to the head and rim of Drum 3 are arranged in a way similar to the chord progression in Stalefish (but assigned to different gestures). The three chord cadence on the head of the drum is muffled by a low-pass filter (modulated by LFOs on resonance and frequency). The longer chord progression mapped to rim of Drum 3 is passed through an unmodulated high-pass filter, juxtaposing the murky-low-passed cadence.

Candy Flip

Here at Sunhouse HQ we have been working on a voice-movement technique using Sensory Percussion. Based loosely on the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass part-writing style refined by JS Bach (and then relentlessly crammed down the throats of Music Theory students for two and a half centuries and counting), this technique has all of the beauty of four-part chorale music, but none of the out-dated, pedantic rules.

Here’s how it works: there are four samplers mapped to the head of Drum 3. Each contain a “C-note” and are quantized to a scale. In Candy Flip, that’s a slightly modified version of the Hungarian Minor scale (which is probably my favorite scale: that raised 4 gets me every time!) — the first sampler contains a bubbly sounding low note and is controlled by a center-to-edge controller: striking the center will play the tonic, playing out towards the edge will cause the note to climb up the octave, leaping along just three other notes.

The tenor voice is in the second sampler and contains more notes of scale, (including that classic raised 4!). It is governed by a different center-to-edge controller with sensitivity settings ensuring that playing directly in the center of the drum will activate a 5th above the tonic. Playing out towards the edge will make the tenor move up along the scale eventually reaching a full two octaves above the tonic at its highest point.

The alto voice in the third sampler is governed by the same scale and center-to-edge controller as the tenor voice, but its range is flipped — ensuring that it is always advancing in the opposite direction of the tenor voice. So when you play out to the edge of the drum it advances down the scale to its lowest pitch of Ab(a minor 6th above the tonic). But striking the drum in the center will cause the alto voice to sound exactly two octaves above the bass.

Finally the soprano voice is pitched an octave above the alto at its lowest point and is able to play all of the notes of the Hungarian minor scale by playing the drum from the center out to the rim (governed by a center-to-rim tip controller).

Perhaps this technique results in parallel 5th and octave movement between the voices, and maybe there is a leap of an augmented 2nd, or there could even be 7ths resolving downward, but Bach is dead so that’s okay.

Varial

Varial explores a variation of the same technique described in Candy Flip, but only has three voices and dramatically includes cycling of octaves between the high voices. The kit uses the voice-movement technique on both Drum 2 and Drum 3 — contrasting the notes of the spindly sounding “spider” synth, with those of the bubblier “dive” synth.

Method Air

Method Air has filthy distorted patterns of bass notes cycled samplers on Drums 2 and 3. There are note-patterns of different lengths inhabiting the center and edge pads of those drums, allowing you to create and control unique melodies on those single drums or spread across the two.

BERN

BERN has a nice modded-out-octavey-lydian-melodies on Drums 2 and 3 (lydian mode has that raised 4 that I dig so much). Drum 1 is an interesting skateboard snare model that Josh built — one of the things that never ceases to impress me about Sensory Percussion is the ability to have recorded samples manipulated to respond to your playing like an actual drum.

Steetlab Soundpack was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to Dreamtropolis, a city of sounds!

With 28 original Sensory Percussion kits and 3,310 raw samples, Dreamtropolis is our largest sound pack release yet, and it’s overflowing with auditory joy and mystery. The pack takes inspiration from Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities. It is rich with chords, tones, and loops, containing the sounds of bass guitars, electric pianos, classical guitar, and more. Dreamtropolis also includes an immense and unique collection of one-shot hits from drum machines, acoustic drums, cymbals and other found-sound-percussive-objects.

The pack contains sounds of:

• Four bass guitars
• A layered dreamy strings patch
• Hits from eight original drum machines
• Two short loops at 74 BPM (including stems for both loops)
• A dreary piano: a ten chord progression and individual notes
• Nine electric pianos: including chord progressions, and notes recorded at various velocities
• A classical guitar: a chord progression and notes with up to nine different strum articulations recorded for each chord
• Acoustic percussion played with soft-mallets
• Field recordings of percussive sounds from New York City, as well as found sounds from an indoor construction site
• Many more bizarre sounds for you to discover in Dreamtropolis

The Dreamtropolis Kits

The first thirteen kits are tonal, and the last fifteen are strictly percussive. Additionally, we have included non-tonal variations of all of the tonal kits, plus a “no-words” version of a kit called Space Time, which contains robotic vocal sounds. So there is a total of 42 kits included in this pack, but only 28 of them are completely unique.

Zirma

The satisfying hum of the kick holds down the foundation of Zirma, named for a city of memory in Calvino’s book. The bass guitar and marimba, mapped to Drums 3 and 2, use a very slow LFO to switch between a C Hungarian Minor scale and a G blues nonatonic scale.

Perinthia

Random LFOs control which portions of stems get looped on samplers in Perinthia. Named for a young town in Invisible Cities, Perinthia suffers from a bizarre astrological mishap causing children born there to have severe defects.

Distorted, phasey bass guitar sounds emanate from Drum 3, and twisted bells from Drum 2.

EP cycles

The electric piano notes cycled on Drum 2 drone on D, which creates a dreamy kind of feeling as the chords cycling on Drum 3 are mostly in Eb Major — however, play the edge of Drum 3 to reliably trigger a D major chord.

Eusapia

In the novel, the citizens of Eusapia have constructed an identical city underground. The underground city is for the corpses of dead citizens who are posed in idealized reenactments of their past life. In the Sensory Percussion kit named Eusapia there is a dreamy strings progression with a nostalgic vibe. Striking the rim tip of Drum 1 resets the strings’ chord progression on Drum 3.

Andria

The city of Andria was created to mirror astrological phenomena — the ratios between streets and buildings reflect the ratios between planets and stars. The city is so in sync with the universe that when the citizens add new structures to their city astronomers look into the skies and find that the universe has changed to reflect the new features.

In the Sensory Percussion kit there are pizzicato chords mapped and cycled on Drum 3. Drum 2 is a glitchy hi-hat.

Beersheba

Similarly to the Zirma kit, Beersheba is controlled by a network of LFOs and buttons activated by your playing. In Beersheba, the electric piano and bass guitar sounds mapped to Drums 2 and 3 morph between randomized notes in C aeolian and C dorian modes. But if you strike the rim tip of Drum 4 — then the scales start morphing between A phrygian and C lydian.

starlight collective

This kit is tricky, but satisfying to play and it demonstrates some of the more interesting structural capabilities of Sensory Percussion.

Check out the samplers on the center pad of Drum 3! The top four samplers’ input is controlled by the rim tips of all four drums: strike the rim tip of Drum 1 to turn on the first sampler and shut off the other three samplers. Drum 2 turns on the second sampler and turns off the other three samplers, and so on.

Each of those four samplers contains a chain of electric keyboard or nylon-string guitar chords. Activating the center pad of Drum 2 will advance to the next chord in each of the samplers. Playing a stick-shot on Drum 2 will reset the samplers to their first chord.

Eudoxia

Eudoxia is a completely chaotic and confusing city in Invisible Cities whose true harmonious order is only revealed when you gaze upon a special carpet.

The Sensory Percussion kit is also a complex tapestry of chaotic yet harmonious rules. Drum 2 has a single pad activated with four samplers: the first two samplers are panned left and right and they contain three different octaves of a C note quantized to a blues scale governed by a center-to-edge controller.

The order of notes is controlled by different shapes and speeds of LFOs, meaning that there is an internal rhythm choosing which octave note will be played when you strike the drum.

Complicating things further, there are two more samplers on this drum with similar rules, but the scale is transposed up a minor third. A square wave LFO is assigned to the volume knob of all four samplers and set so that just the top two or the bottom two samplers are sounding at the same time — that means that there will never be dissonant scales sounding at the same time.

The result of this complex network of rules is the chaotic yet harmonious soundscape you create when you play Eudoxia.

Leandra

The kit, Leandra, demonstrates another way to create structure within your Sensory Percussion kits. Striking the center of Drum 3 firmly will activate a chord in a cycled progression, use the edge of the same drum to toggle to a new sampler where the same chords have been modulated up an octave. Striking the edge again will toggle back to the lower chords.

glass jungle

Thick soundscapes of marimba, acoustic guitar and piano notes emanate from Drums 2 and 3 of this kit. When designing this kit it began to feel like I was roaming through a glass jungle of sounds, especially since the snare sounds (mapped to Drum 1) are layered over randomized glass sounds from the Elements pack and the kick (on Drum 4) is a pitched down coconut sample from that same pack.

dreamJolt

I am sometimes awoken abruptly from a dream shortly after falling asleep — it’s a very human phenomenon, I think: that feeling of a sharp fall and then bursting awake only to drift back asleep a few moments later. This kit is named after that feeling.

Stems of both of the 74 BPM loops are featured prominently in dreamJolt. Drums 2 and 3 of this kit contain the stacks of loop stems. Predictable LFO waves control not only which stem in the stack gets played back when you strike the drum, but also which short chunk of the stem is released into the soundscape. Randomized LFOs turn loops of the small chunks of stems on and off.

journeyTravels

Like dreamJolt, there is a ghost in the machine of journeyTravels — loops, scale degree, panning, and phaser chamber send level are randomized with LFOs.

The electric piano sounds mapped across Drums 2 and 3 are velocity sensitive, playing softly will produce a softly recorded articulation of the electric piano, playing firmly will activate the pleasing harmonic distortion that electric pianos are known for when you firmly strike the keys.

Isidora

Calvino describes Isidora as a paradoxical city of desires both beautiful and violent — dreamed of in his youth when such technological advancement was impossible, but now still unattainable when the narrator arrives at the city in his old age to be relegated to the outskirts of the city square able only to watch the young people live out his desires. Calvino claims: “desires are already memories” when you arrive at Isidora.

In the Sensory kit named for this city, the sliding melody on Drum 2 is controlled by a center to edge timbre controller. On Drum 3, the electric piano chords are cycled with each hit above a set velocity threshold.

getro man

Getro Man is simply what I believe basic drums will sound like when the bots inevitably obtain sentience and start making instruments themselves. The kit contains sounds from a synth I sampled in my dreams — when I awoke the next morning the sounds were already processed and ready to load into Sensory, so I used them to build this kit.

Octavia

In a survey a few months ago we asked Sensory users what they wanted to see in future kits and samples released by Sunhouse. You folks are incredibly diverse in your sonic tastes so we received answers ranging from “Freaky Shit!!” to “More Normal Sounds.” Octavia definitely falls into the “Freaky Shit!!” category. This kit is comprised mostly of dubbed out field recordings, but there are a few live percussion elements scattered throughout: mostly on the less accessible gestures like stickshot and damped edge.

Soft Mallet

The sample material of this kit is all from the “Soft Mallet Drums” folder which is a box of 464 sounds recorded by striking percussive objects with a soft mallet. The kick and the snare (Drums 4 and 1) are pretty straight-forward Sensory mappings. But Drums 2 and 3 have soft mallet bongo and dhol sounds, pitched with center-to-edge controllers, and also loops are turned on with a random LFO.

Hypatia

On the “Freaky Shit!!” to “More Normal Sounds” spectrum, I think Hypatia is more in the “normal” category. The sounds mostly come from the Hypno Plaza drum machine folder, and the Sensory mapping is such to allow you to lay down a down-home-funky-electro-groove with no trouble.

orphanKitto

This kit is an orphan of the Swarm Sapience Pack and Base Pack, roaming the streets of Dreamtropolis. This kit doesn’t actuall yuse any sounds from the massive Dreamtropolis folder, but does use many of the Sensory techniques in other Dreamtropolis kits, such as random LFO looping.

3rd planets

In this kit you can use the rim tips of all four drums to toggle between the samplers mapped to the center of Drum 3. Strike the rim tip of Drum 1 to turn the head of Drum 3 into a pitchy-stereophonic-clay-drum-sound-world. Hit the rim tip of Drum 2 to toggle on Drum 3’s tight hi-hat. Striking the rim tip of Drum 3 changes the head of that drum into a percussive cycle of drum set sounds. And finally striking the rim of Drum 4 switches the head of Drum 3 into a realm of random percussive classical guitar body and string sounds.

Lilith

Lilith is a mythical being in Jewish Mythology — a strong female figure who is feared and rumored to devour babies. Like the mythological Lilith, this kit is strong, female and calls for a solid groove. Hide your babies.

space time

I met a robot not too long ago, and I recorded her saying a bunch of appealing words and phrases. She didn’t pass the Turing test, but I did get her to say: “Very tall kangaroos, one with a mane like a lion, walking politely down the street with their handlers” — which is a summary of a dream I had. In that dream the kangaroos were as massive and as tall as giraffes: they were absolutely terrifying, but I was not afraid because of their breath-taking majesty.

That sentence and the cool words are all chopped up and included in a folder called “roboVox.” The cool words are featured in this kit on Drum 3.

tranceContraption

tranceContraption is named after a drum machine I recorded. Like Hypatia, it is a pretty standard Sensory kit mapping — nothing too fancy, but here to help you lay down something dope on your next hit song.

freakRepeat

Here’s another mostly standard kit. There is a virtual acoustic snare and kick mapped to Drums 1 and 4: the snare has been sampled with big fat broom drumsticks. Drum 3 is a virtual acoustic conga sampled with a plastic mallet. Drum 2 is where it gets freaky: check out those hi-hat samplers — there’s a lot of crazy LFO stuff going on!

precious perc

Comprised of various drum-machine sounds and go-to Sensory mappings precious perc also makes use of a technique that I frequently use to thicken the sounds of my kits: I arm a send track with heavy, swampy compression (low threshold, high ratio, slow release) and then I put an EQ (with the mids sucked out of it) after that compression in the effects chain. Finally I send my Sensory channels (especially my kick and snare sounds) to those effects, sometimes controlling the send amount with velocity.

abandoned soul

One thing I love to do is drag hundreds of similar sounds into a Sensory Percussion kit and then cycle them in some way. That’s what’s going on in Drum 3 of this kit.

One day recently, Tlacael and I went to an indoor construction site near Sunhouse HQ and recorded 113 percussive sounds from around the room. After editing them, I dropped every single one into a sampler and set it to cycle.

Then I duplicated that sampler, panned the two samplers left and right, and changed the method of cycling on one of the samplers to a random LFO. I then dragged different random LFOs to the pitch parameter of both samplers, and modulated the time knob of a delay on the center pad — where everything was mapped.

Have fun with this one!

grenadine dream

Short delays and Chorus effects with a lot of feedback are a blast! Even though this kit makes use of those trippy effects pretty heavily, they are dialed in pretty tight. And that makes this kit feel surprisingly organic, even though there are cycled electronic sounds on the toms and the kick mapping is a modded out drum machine sub.

Thekla

In Invisible Cities, Thekla is a city that is constantly and completely under construction because the citizens fear that if they stop building it will cause the city and the entire universe to collapse around them.

And now I challenge you to keep building on top of this foundational Dreamtropolis kit and never stop!

swampDrums

You are welcome to wander into this electronic swamp, just don’t get lost! Drum 1 is an electronic snare mapping to help you cut through the murky sounds of the other three drums. Drums 2, 3, and 4 have just one sample mapped to each, but rely on timbre and velocity controllers and LFOs to modulate those dark gloomy sounds and effects.

Dreamtropolis Sound Pack was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read on to take a walk-through of the kits and learn about the making of this pack!

When you install the Ganzfeld Effect pack you’ll notice that there is a new folder named Ganzfeld Percussion in your Sunhouse sample library. It contains folders full of delightfully terrene percussion sounds, tonal sounds of a banjo, an accordion, a harmonium, and ocarinas. Those sounds were all recorded in seven recording sessions we produced here at Sunhouse HQ in Queens, NY.

Kits:

Tahawus

The most electronic kit in the pack, Tahawus is a nod back to the Swarm Sapience Pack with uneven stereophonic cycles mapped to drum 2 and drum 3 giving your grooves a nice poly-metric feel.

ElectroEncephalopod

ElectroEncephalopod is an instant classic kit in Ganzfeld, it has a standard kick, snare and tom mapping, but drum 2 contains a pitchy stereophonic cycle of an earthy-wooden agogo. It’s perfect for holding down a tight groove when jamming with friends.

dream machine

This kit reminds me of a favorite book, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Perhaps that’s because it relies heavily on an African iron bell I picked up from a music store in the West Village. The man who sold it to me told me that it is probably about 100 years old and from West Africa.

It was sitting amongst antique iron bells from the same collection, but I bought this particular bell because of its interesting harmonic structure: when struck in a particular spot it produces two distinct tones.

The cycling bell sound is mapped to the center and edge of drum 3, the kit has other groovy percussive sounds on drum 2, and a kick and snare mapped to drums 4 and 1, respectively.

erethism

Drum 2 of this kit has some interesting stuff going on: Cycled kalimba sounds and randomized clay-mug sounds are mapped to the head. There is a cowbell mapped to the rim of the drum. The rim and the center are blended, but the cowbell sampler on the rim is removed from blends, so that when you strike the center of the drum you will hear just the kalimba and clay-mug, but when you strike the rim you will hear the cowbell AND a blend of the kalimba and clay-mug.

Furthermore, the percussive clay-mug sounds are pitched on a center-to-edge controller: hits more towards the center pitch those samplers lower. The tonal kalimba samplers’ pitch are governed by a center-to-rim tip controller with its sensitivity heavily altered so that hits on the head will reliably play the tonic, but playing the rim will cause the kalimbas’ pitch to slide up two octaves along a blues nonatonic scale.

Real de Catorce

Many of the kits in this pack are named after ghost towns, and this kit is one of them. My mom is a potter and she has made me the clay bells, udu, and some of the other percussive objects in this pack. Real de Catorce features the tonal and percussive sounds of an ocarina we made together.

Kolmanskop

Kolmanskop captures the raw spirit of Ganzfeld Effect. There aren’t a huge amount of samples or flashy effects in this kit, but it still employs a natural earthy vibe. There’s a natural sounding snare and ride cymbal mapped to the head and rim of drum 1, bell and bubbly clay-mug sounds on drum 2, a rich floor tom sample on drum 3, and a commanding, compressed, pitched-down bass drum sample on drum 4.

Playing buzzes on drum 1 or on drum 3 causes the samplers to slide up in pitch, but most other gestures on this kit are subtle and natural and employed to inspire you to lay down solid grooves.

Tawergha

Drum 1 of this kit is a fully-mapped-virtual acoustic snare drum we recorded on the same night as the Ganzfeld multi-percussion instruments. Within the 135 snare samples assigned to the pads of drum 1 there are five layers of three velocities.

Bubbly sounds and pitched whistles from a glass cola bottle inhabit drums 2 and 3 of this kit, and drum 4 is a warm, powerful kick drum.

Dark Retreat

Poly-metric, stereophonic cycles on drums 2 and 3 of this kit add hypnotic rhythmic variation to your grooves — the sounds mapped to those drums are multi-percussion instruments like a tiny toy djembe, cow bells, and a wooden agogo. The snare sound on drum 1 is modulated by speed, velocity and timbre: Playing buzzes will pitch the drum down and increase the amount of distortion (the “drive” of which is increased by playing harder), and playing towards the edge will also increase the pitch of the snare sampler.

Szanticska

A glassy, binaural, raindroppy, looping soundscape can be created on this kit by playing near the edge of drum 2 — that’s how to start looping the pitch-modulated clay bell sounds. The loop will stop if you play the center of that drum. Drum 3 has the same gestural technique, but has cycled sounds collected from a clay mug (struck with a stick, fingers and hands).

Turning loop on/off with a timbre controller isn’t difficult: first assign the edge pad to the center pad (this expands the range of center pad to the entire drum). Add a sample or samples to that pad. Drag a center-to-edge timbre controller to the loop parameter and adjust the sensitivity parameter to taste (I like it to be skewed towards the edge, that way I can turn off the loop very easily by hitting the drum approximately near the center (and that makes enabling the loop on more deliberate). Finally, turn off “all pads” on the controller.

fata morgana

fata morgana is another kit that doesn’t steal the show. It’s a kit that would be great for when you are jamming with your friends and just need some earthy, percussive sounds to help you lay down a solid groove.

dhols

Mahin Salman, sound artist & musician, and great friend of Sunhouse brought two dhols back from a trip to Pakistan, and we sampled them EXTENSIVELY for this kit and others — collecting over 1,500 samples of tilli and dagga (the traditional sticks), as well as hand gestures.

Those two dhols are mapped across all of the drums in this kit. Drums 3 and 1 (usually the floor tom and the snare drum in preset Sensory kits) have the bass head and treble head of the higher pitched Sindh Dhol. Drums 4 and 2 (typically the kick and snare positions in preset kits) have mappings of the bass and treble head of the lower Kolachi Dhol.

Foncebadon

In Foncebadon play out towards the edge of drum 1 to engage pitching and a flanger on this otherwise solid, dampened snare sound. Drums 2 and 3 cycle percussion sounds to give your playing predictable, groovy textures, while the pitched down kick (mapped to drum 4) hangs steady — only modulating sample-length slightly: harder hits barely increase the decay of the sample.

dhol + harmonium

Mahin brought in her Qawwali Harmonium one evening and we collected samples of chord progressions and notes.

For this kit, we mapped a raucous, C minor, single octave bass melody to drum 3 pitched by playing from center-to-edge and a matching chord progression cycling on drum 2. The tonal sounds are thresholded by the velocity I/O panel, allowing you to play the dhol sounds quietly underneath the notes and chords.

pitchy perc

pitchy perc has been a favorite of people stopping by our booth at festivals and of artists dropping by the office. It is made up from Udu, Dhol, and Conga drums. The Udu is meticulously mapped to drum 1 and is pitched by a center-to-edge controller. The Dhol is spread across drums 2 and 3: on drum 2, its treble head is left unpitched, making drum 2 the groovy-centerpiece of the kit. The bass head of the dhol is mapped to drum 3, and is pitched dramatically with a center-to-edge controller with a lot of stretchy-portamento. Finally, drum 4 is lifted directly from one of the original kits in our Base Pack called “Drum Circle.” It is a kick-drum mapping of a detuned, pitched-down conga drum.

banjaccord

Sunhouse hardware engineer and bluegrass musician, Ellery Marshall brought in his banjo one night and recorded notes, chords, loops, and flourishes for this pack. The kit banjaccord features a melodic cycle of those sounds on drum 2, accompanied by the sounds of Christopher’s accordion mapped to drum 3. The scales for both the accordion and banjo are controlled by a center-to-edge controller that is more sensitive to the edge, allowing you to easily hit the tonic of the scale by striking near the center of your drum.

Ganzfeld Effect was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been a little over 2 years since Sensory Percussion was born, and it’s come a long way! We’re excited to release Sensory Percussion 1.5 today, which is one of our biggest updates to date — we have over lots of new features and countless bug fixes, UI improvements, and changes under the hood.

Let’s dive into all the new stuff!

Library enhancements

We know, we know — the previous SP library panel left much to be desired. So we fixed it.

Search and Sort 🔎

You can now search through the Sensory Percussion Library for samples, sets and kits. You can also sort your results by file name, modified date, and file size.

User bookmarks 📁

We also added the ability to bookmark folders on your computer. This was a top requested feature, we’re happy to deliver. User bookmarks will show any Set files (.sps) as well as samples.

Controller Updates

We’ve made some nice additions to controllers that makes them easier to program and gives them more things to control.

You can now assign controllers to pads 😲

This feature has some pretty wide reaching implications and opens up your kits to all kinds of new possibilities for control and sound design. Any controller type can now be assigned to pads — the most obvious application would be to assign external MIDI controllers (put your old drum pads to good use) or keyboard control to pads. So if you’re on a plane and want to design a SP kit, you can assign computer keys to pads and tap things out. There are also other much more esoteric uses — assign a velocity controller to a pad that is controlled by another pad. I’m sure you all will find even more interesting uses for this!

Setting controller parameters

We added some nice input boxes to the controller parameters. This makes it much easier to set precise values for ranges (which is quite tricky with sliders). Check it out.

Sampler updates

The Sensory Percussion sampler is a beast — there’s so much it can do. We know it’s already packed with buttons, but you’ll definitely like these new ones.

Loop and Reverse

A top requested feature since forever — you can now loop samples, either continually or set the number of loops. This isn’t a full-featured loop box with tempo syncing, but it’s still super cool.

And reversing samples does just what you think — it flips the waveform of the sampler.

Endless possibilities, especially when you start assigning controllers to these new buttons.

Play & Stop

Each sampler now has dedicated play (▶) ️and stop (◼️) buttons. These are just plain useful when you are working in the sampler — especially when you are dealing with long samples and sometimes just need it to stop playing.

But these two little buttons become extremely powerful when you start assigning controllers to them. Let’s say you want to trigger some long backing tracks with an SPD. Instead of using one pad per long sample (and making that pad unusable for actual playing), now you can put the samples in stacked samplers on a pad you might not be using (like “shell”) and assign MIDI input controllers to the (▶) of each sampler. So you’ve just turned one pad into unlimited individual “pads” with the play button. Dope.

Input Active button

We cleaned up the title bar of the sampler and added a new nifty button that determines whether that sampler accepts trigger inputs. It’s different from turning off the sampler, which immediately kills all audio output. The input active button is especially useful when you are building loops and want them to not change while you are playing over them — once they are set the way you like, you can turn off input active with a controller to keep them going without being disturbed.

Other updates

Master stop button

Several of you have asked for a way to quickly kill all audio output on all channels. So we added a nice, prominent “stop” button to the master channel. And as always, this is controllable in all the usual ways — assigning it to the spacebar is super convenient.

Drop targets everywhere

You’ll now notice that when you drag a controller assignment, a lot more items light up, including all the pads.

We also added new drop targets when you grab a kit, drum, or sample from the library. Now you’ll know exactly where you can drop them.

Quick access to Pad Click Volume

We added Pad Click Mute and Volume controls to the top of the window. This control used to be hidden in the settings panel, but having quick access is very useful for when you’re on stage, plugged into the PA, and don’t want to accidentally trigger audio by selecting a pad.

We added a new option in the preferences window for Sample Audition Volume for when you are clicking through the library.

The rest…

• We made some pretty significant improvements to the core timbre recognition algorithm, which means that the software will just work better — fewer false hits and less training needed for it to work great. Much more to come on this front!
• We also updated the way blends work — we made the curve between pads tighter so there’s less overlap and muddiness.
• We changed some of the auto-normalization logic and made it clearer what to do when the software can’t detect your sensor.
• And finally, we squashed hundreds of bugs and quite a few memory leaks throughout the software. 🐞

We hope you dig this update — let us know what you think!

— The Sunhouse team

Say hello to Sensory Percussion 1.5 was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Swarm Sapience is an all new sound pack inspired by the hive-mind containing kits with bubbly, stereophonic cycles, colorful chords and notes, staccato drum machines, and intimately abstract percussion! Some of these kits are tonal, some are strictly percussive. We included non-tonal versions of all of the tonal kits, which is something many of our users asked for.

You can read descriptions of all of our other soundpacks here, and if you are a Sensory Percussion user you can download them here!

The 556 samples included in this pack are organized into three categories: Electro Drum Kits, Notes and Chords, and Percussion.

Each of the seven folders in Electro Drum Kits contains a collection of heavily processed drum-machine sounds. The Percussion folder is overflowing with the sounds of percussive trinkets recorded with contact microphones and then verbed out. The Notes and Chords folder has the sounds of eight synthy instruments, each contains at least one progression with vibey chord voicings.

Kits

amyCycles

Cycling, pitched, stereo-dreamscapes inhabit Drum 2 and Drum 3 of this kit. The sharp percussive sounds originate from the Eusociality Drums collection: named for the highest level of organization within the animal kingdom: ants, bees, parasitic shrimp, naked-mole rats, and — debatably — humans are eusocial. This kit comes straight from the hive-mind!

Rat Utopia

The chords mapped to Drum 3 can be switched on and off by striking the rim-tip of Drum 4. I thought I was original and edgy for naming the chords used in this kit after a deadly space virus that I day-dreamed one day, but then I remembered that’s the entire premise for The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.

Behavioral Sink

This kit is named for James Cahoun’s controversial theory that moral human behavior collapses as population density increases.

Uneven, immersive, stereo, percussive cycles emanate from the head and rim of Drum 3 in Behavioral Sink. “What does that mean?” you ask. It means that there are two samplers mapped to the head of Drum 3 — one panned left, one panned right — each contains the same stack of samples set to “cycle” mode, but the one on the right has one fewer sample. In this particular case that creates a 9 against 8 polymetric cycle between the panned samplers.

Malthus

Dense cycles of notes ring out from the four hard-panned samplers on the head of Drum 2 in Malthus.

They are pitched to a C-minor pentatonic scale, two of those samplers use one of my favorite quantized pitching techniques enabled by Sensory Percussion: a center-to-edge timbre controller governs the pitch, but the center’s sensitivity of that controller is set pretty high (making it have a larger strike zone than the edge, and therefore making it easy to hit the tonic). The other two samplers are pitched by velocity.

Universe 25

The habitat used to demonstrate James Calhoun’s societal collapse theory was called Universe 25. It was described as a mouse paradise, and he created conditions that allowed the animals to breed to the point of immense overpopulation, carefully observing each generation’s increasingly destructive behavior along the way.

His results have been used interpret human phenomena such as urban decay. But I think it’s important to remember that mice are not humans — they can’t write or enforce policies or solve complex problems.

This kit has pretty notes randomized to a custom scale on Drum 2, and a chain of cycled chords mapped to Drum 3. Amaury Acosta plays this kit in the video at the top of this post.

Swarm Sapience Pack Release was originally published in sunhouseinc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.