Download FM Harpsichord
Many people know that I'm quite a big fan of Propellerhead Software and all of their products. Those Swedes just know how to do it right. One of the best things about their software is that you can often find cool new interesting ways to create sounds. They may not always be ground breaking methods but I'm going to start sharing some things that I come across to help inspire others in their music making.
One of the functions of Reason/Record that I don't use enough of is the sampling feature. While I mostly enjoy playing around with analog synthesizers and their software counterparts, it's a lot of fun to create strange and wondrous noises via other methods or by combining them. Mixing synthesis with sampling is one of those combinations that can certainly widen your pallet of sound.
Sometimes I'll be toying around with a particular sound patch in Thor and I'll come across a great sounding FM patch that doesn't track well across the entire keyboard. I'll get a key here and there that sounds interesting but the others aren't much more than dissonant noise. You can take those notes that sound good and make them even more useful with sampling.
If you check out the Sound Design section over on my Pure Shift website, you'll find a download called FM Harpsichord. Inside the zip file, you'll find a NN-XT patch and a Thor patch. The Thor Patch was created as I was tinkering with some basic FM synthesis to see how things doing various types of routing. If you load it up, you'll hear some notes that have an almost harpsichord sound to them but the rest are fairly dissonant. What I did was sample a couple of those good notes and layer them together in the NN-XT to use as a lead. The NN-XT patch in the zip file is the result of that.
The moral of this story is to try and think out of the box when designing new sounds. If you hear something you like, figure out a way to use it and save it. Reason/Record gives you the tools to turn trash into treasure with the ability to sample anything inside or outside of your computer. Sampling isn't just for recording yourself beating on pots and pans!
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