Ensoniq CD - THE DEMOS von Pelle Piano

This CD-ROM contains over 300 sounds and 36 demos to show some ways how to play them. The CD-ROM is not intended to cover every instrument known to man but to provide useful rhythm-section sounds that has a level of "live"-quality added to them. Here are some general information about the instruments.

BASSES - All bassguitar sounds has ghostnotes (4) on the three lowest keys. On some basses a palmslap is added on the Eb. Most of the basses has one or more layer with fretnoise and buzz. These can easily be deactivated by deleting the corresponding layer.The Metal Thumbs slapbass is monophonic on seven keys from the low B to imitate the hammer-on technique. The whole instrument is Sample Start modulated. That means it will go from a normal bass sound to the slapsound dynamically using only one layer of samples. (This would be used to a much greater extent if the filters in the ASR-10 had been as fast as the 16+).

DRUMS- Some of the drumsets (as youll notice) dont quite make it as standalone instruments. This is because they originally was part of a demo where other instruments had a key role ,and as I always made my demos to fit on 1 discette ( this is very obvious on 16+ demos) , I really had to squeeze them in. The Brush Set has a few neat features. It has two samples of snare buzz ( on top of keyboard) that can be activated when hitting the toms or kick (Patch XO and XX) for added realism. When releasing the kick key there is a sample of the kick pedal chain. There is also a sample of the hihat-pedal mechanics to be used with the footclosed hihat.. On most drumsets there is useful short snare roll on lowest E & F.All drumsets has a GM Map on patch XO.The loopdrums are loops made within the ASR-10 with the drums on this CD.Then each useable hit was isolated and GM mapped.When using loops with your sequencer its a good idea to turn off the the Loop of the sample and trigger it by hand.Record Drums are useful if you want an old sounding kit for a song or groove.

ELECTRIC PIANOS- The King Rhodes has 127 samples.Four velocitysensitive layers and one with the pedal mechanics. This is my own Rhodes and its not in good shape. But I was looking for this crappy sound at the time and if its to dirty for you , you can turn off layer 4 or use some of the other Rhodes sounds. Most of the Wurlitzers and Rhodes are sampled with 2 or more layers.Some are resampled thru the Speaker-effect and they are very small, memorywise.

GUITARS- As with the basses, the four lowest keys include pick strokes and a palmslap sometimes appear at low Eb. The guitars are mostly one or two-layer sounds + a few layers with different fretnoises. The Dobro Slide has a lot of key release noises and a slide vibrato noise only when modulation is applied.The rhythm guitar part on the Travel Guitar Demo was made by first playing a strum groove with the four lowest keys and then adding the chords which makes it quite realistic.The Telecaster is my favorite, its very good for blues, soul and country.

ORGANS- There is a wide variety of organs here. The first 10 are sampled thru a Leslie with the speakers stopped to be able to make very short loops and use the ASR-10 Leslie effect which is very good exept that it has to much vibrato using fast speed. Another approach that is more common is to sample a B-3 with both slow and fast Leslie, so you can change the Leslie speed with the modulation wheel .There are some of these here too.A key release click (very important) is added on a separate layer on all organs. The Line Organs are sampled derectly from the B-3 for use with a real Leslie.This is the best way to get a "real" Hammond sound.

SYNTH SOUNDS- My favorite here is the Clean Clav in the DX Deluxe section. Three very expressive layers of an old DX Patch and an extra layer with the typical DX 7 release noise. Otherwise the synth sounds wont make you flip, But some of the synthbasses came out pretty well. The Jurassic synth is originally a sound from the TS-10 from where I borrowed the concept and made it up with 8 layers of detuned percussion sounds.To emulate the small timbre changes on an analog synth, some of the synthbasses has a copied layer with the same pitch and randomly modulates the start position of the second layer.This creates a sort of flanger sound to the attack.

1 BRUSHBANK
A brush-set with a lot of different motions, great DW-toms, adjustable snarebuzz, lot of details.

2 PICCOLO BANK
Brushset 2 with a piccolo snare, different toms and kick.

3 TRAVEL BANK
A Yamaha acoustic with microphones built in.Very small but the best guitar Ive sampled. Two layers with velocity switching and two layers with string buzz and fretnoises.Also features a Washburn semiacoustic bass with 3 ghoststrokes and a palmslap on the lowest keys and fretnoises of course.Has a soft acoustic sound.

4 DOBRODEMO
Two Dobros.One sampled with slide.Lots of samples of the slide accidently hitting the neck,buzzes and string noise. Also a vibrato noise sample that only sounds when modulation is applied.Strum samples (4) on the lowest keys for comping.

5 ACCORDIONS
Three Accordions. Two very expensive ones with a lot of diamonds and stuff on them.Serinetto is the cheap one , that is suitable for zydeco, the Paolo Soprani and Bugari are more versatile and has layers with the different reeds in a accordion.Also samples of air, button in and button out. No keys on these ones.

6 GRETCHBASS
This is a great Gretchbass.Semiacoustic and fretless. Sounds very "live" whatever you play.Two layers with velocityswitching+noises and ghoststrokes.

7 SVEN Z BANK
A song called "Someones got his hands full of my wife", written for my band Sweet Pain.Sven Zetterberg sings as only he can and Anna Nederdal backs him up vocally.Includes a lot of very small sounds. The brass-section sounds really crappy on its own but great in a context. Ensemble, trumpets and baryton in one instrument.The "Martin" drums sounds very old and has a vinylnoise sample to make it sound like a loop.

8 BACKAS BASS
As my fingers are to weak I had to let BackaHans play the acoustic bass. There are 2 versions, the small one is just 150 bl but sounds good anyway. Has a very nice vibrato.Ghostnotes and a big palmslap.And a tiny "string hits the fretboard" sample , randommodulated key release.

9 SEDATION
When your dentist gives you a to strong sedative it could sound something like this. Strange demo with a lot of very small sounds. Vocals by Eric Bibb in a gospellike vein. As with all demos,(exept 28-36) I always kept a 1,4 MG limit.For the ease to demo the Ensoniq samplers.

10 ESTRAD 3
A very acoustic drumset sampled in the cellar of Estrad Musik.Four snare hits, two with rim.Two sidestick samples. Snare ruffs(tiny rolls).And a variety of tom-hits.7 Hihatsamples.

11 TELEBANK
A Telecaster with two velocityswitched layers.Fretnoise and and four strums on the lowest keys.One of the strings is pitchmodulated by the mod-wheel to simulate the fender stringbender often used by country guitarplayers.Sounds very nice with tremolo or distortion. To bad the Distorsion efx in the ASR arent to hot. However the Waweboy discs has some VERY useful distortions together with Delay AND reverb.Get it.

12 NEUSER BASS
A very hi-tech looking bass, violet in color and a very modern sound.Two layer velocityswitch,ghostnotes,buzzes and a palmslap.Includes "Ethnic skin", samples from a drum with cowhide I bought i Mozambique (I had some blues gigs there, believe it or not) a small jazzy sounding drumset and a very small (82bl) velocityswitched rhodes.

13 JAZZGUITAR
I always wanted a jazzguitar, but every sampled one I heard was to clean.I ended up using my Firebird !!!??. ,heavy compression and the neck microphone did the job.Noises and strums of course.Here is also a B-3 sampled with fast speed, I then added some tremolo to deepen the leslie effect and to get the speed more consequent ly spread across the keyboard.A small but very effective Rhodes (537 bl), are sampled string sound,"Record Drums"was made to sound like it is a loop when sequenced."Budget Ac" is the small version of the BackaHans ac bass.

14 KING RHODES
On my own Rhodes the hammers dont always hit the tine properly, when you strike the keys real hard.That reproduces a very short metallic sound that ive never heard on a sampled Rhodes before. This is relly a MULTISAMPLED Rhodes, 128 samples in five layers. 4 layers of velocityswitched Rhodes.Almost every white key is sampled at four different velocities.Every note sounds different. If its to dirty for you,try turning of the fourth layer.

15 NYLON+RHODES
This is an old demo with Eqed Rhodes in two velocityswitched layers, it has a pronounced bellquality to it.Good for the David Foster songs. The ac nylon guitar was the first one I sampled.The mike was a cheap blue Fostex. (I dont know much about mikes ,I usually just go for it). The guitar has a lot of hand percussion sounds and strums which is good when you want a rythm guitar.You can solo the guitar track and then youll hear what all the strums and percussion things do for realism."Voice Lead" is actuallly my own voice, synthesized using the Transwave parameters.

16 TO STEVIE
One of my favourite guitar sounds. This Stratocaster was hanging on the wall on Estrad Music and I recorded some notes to edit them ar home to see if it was worth making an instrument of.
It sounded great but when I got back to the music store to do some real sampling it had been sold, so all I had was the four tryout samples.This guitar is those four samples. They are sample Start modulated to get smooth transitions in tone velocitywise.It has a really fat tone. In the first part of the demo its clean, in the second part a little distortion is applied, a little towards Clapton.This is an early demo when I didnt realize the importance of having the drums on track one,so its a little wobbly in the rythm section here.The "Mix String" I merged a Mirage String sample with an OBX patch from the trusty old DX 7. Sml "SoulBass" is a mellow bass sound palyed on my ARIA bass with a sock under the string.

17 WURLIE 3 LAYERS
Three velocityswitched Wurlitzer layers. I added a sample of the inner mechanics on key release. Two versions depending on how much memory youve got available.

18 SML 3 LYR RHODES
Two versions of this one to. Identical to the Wurlie above, but Rhodes.

19 ESTRAD RHODES
A rather crispy Rhodes even though its sampled straight. Two velocityswitched layers. Also featured is a Warwick fretless bass with the normal bass samples as ghostnotes and buzzes.

20 RICKENBACKER
I suddenly felt an urge to have a Rickenbacker with a slightly distorted sound so I went to Estrad and found a good one.Two velocityswitched layers with the usual bass noises.In the demo the bass is fed thru the Leslie EFX for a little chorused and distorted sound. This demo also has two synth sounds and some assorted percussion.

21 ERIC-HEAVEN
He is quite a singer ,Eric Bibb. He has just got a good record deal in England with Warner and his latest album was produced by the legendary Mike Vernon. Here he is singing one of my songs. A lot of small sounds that could be usefull. Sub Bass is a very low synth bass the is more felt than heard. I resampled and merged some old favourite Pad Instruments and added som resampled strings to make catchy ornaments, and theres also a SY 85 sopranosaxophone.

Plus some Beat Box and EFX samples.

22 SOFT AC SET
Bass and drum demo. The Music Man was sampled with the MM built in dampers.Small rubber things under the strings.A good combination for soul songs.The drums has the same layout and samples as "Estrad III" drums.

23 METAL THUMBS
A hi-tech violet slapbass that is samplestart modulated. This is a great feature that does not work to well on the ASR, due to its slow filters.The bass has section that is monophonic from the lox B to simulate hammerons which is a very important part of slapbass playing.Thumb ghostnotes on the 4 lowest keys. Also an e.piano, distorted guitar and drums.

24 ZLICK STRAT
My first demo for 16+. A Talecaster played with my thumb for a very soft attack. A second layer with harder struck strings.And the usual strums and noises.A small B-3 is here to but there is a bigger and better version in the organ section.

25 AC DRUM 2
Same layout and hits as Estrad 3 but a snappier set.

26 CROSSROADS
This one I had leave out because of copyright problems. I replaced it with "Elmores Broom".

27 IN THE SIXTIES
Sort of looking back to the sixties sounds.Drums from an old record with an ambient feel.Equalized JazzBass, a nice brass section with muted horns, and two resampled Wurlitzers (they wre fed thru the Speaker Emulation and sampled again).These work great when you are short of memory or you want the Wurlie to sound like it came from an external speaker.Also a small Jazzguitar resampled thru the speaker emulator.

28 TELE BOSSA
Here comes some bigger demos featuring teh highlight sounds from the earlier discs. Telecaster, Estrad III drums, ac bass..etc.The Sizzle cymbals are 9 samples of various strokes.A 22" ride cymbal I had drilled for holes.I love sizzle cymbals.

29 TAMBOURINE
A big (memorywise) tambourine. Shakes, two soft strokes,four hard strokes, and six right and left "swings" to get the right motion.

30 ORGANDEMO 1
These samples comes from an earlier effort to sell sounds. They were all contained in one 1.4 Mb disc and features 10 different registrations on a B-3 sampled thru a non motion leslie(just to get the sound of it) and applying the ASR Leslie simulator. This makes the orgens very small. The ASR Leslie has a great sound but has a vibrato that is to big on the fast speed.To bad its not programmable. The other Leslie EFX that came with 2.0 OS dont have the same fat sound to them.Tremolo is on the modulation wheel.Release clicks is also there."Smithfull" is a good representation of what can be done if you put your favourite organs in layers and vomumemodulate them with the modulation wheel, then you have the flexibility to change registrations dynamically and have the percussion on the patch select buttons.
Here are also a drumset that sounds like an old loop, a slapbass with a muddy old seventies sound and here , the brass-section comes to its right.

31 ORGAN DEMO 2
A swing organ demo played mostly with big chords and fast leslie using the "Smithfull" organ to show the smooth transitions between the registrations.And sizzle cymbals of course.

32 SLOW BLUES
Another Telecaster demo with more distortion and a sort of Stevie Ray kind of playing.(but Albert was first).

33 OLD STYLES
Another feature for the Dobro guitars , now with two Harmonicas. One sampled with as close to the microphone as possible for use with some distortion.The other for more acoustic sounding harmonica. These are "A" harmonicas that are suitable to play in D,A and E.Every hole was sampled both in and out.

34 STEELGUITAR
Small steelguitarsounding instruments. The DX Steel comes from the DX 7 and the other one was my Stratocaster sampled with a slide at the 12th fret. They both have a very slow attack when played softly to emulate the use of a volume pedal. When struck hard they are normal. On the demo I use a volume pedal a lot. Here is the acoustic harmonica playing lead.

35 ELMORES BROOM
Dirty slide guitar from a Flying V. This is the guitar from the BB King demo(couldnt include that for copyright reasons).The Garage Set was sampled at a warehouse in Gothenburg along time ago.

36 MR RACKJAZZ
I sampled a few sounds from the MR 76.The Tenor sax has som added air samples as do the Mute Trumpet. The sax also have button klicks.The drumset includes various GM mapped percussion. The ac bass is a manipulated factory sound.

"The Demos" von Pelle Piano