Neo Soul Smoke and Honey

82 BPM and a late, loose pocket. The drums are not quantised and not just swung: each voice has its own place against the grid. In the most dragged grooves the snare lands up to 28 milliseconds late and the kick pushes up to 12 milliseconds early, the hats wander a few milliseconds from hit to hit, and the swing runs from 10 to 20 percent. Three feels: behind the beat, laid back and drunk. Full, stripped, top, percussion and hi-hat loops are separate folders. The harmony is the genre's: minor ninths, elevenths, dominant thirteenths, major ninths and the 7#9, voiced without the root in the middle of the keyboard, the way a keyboard player leaves the bottom to the bass. The tuned loops are four bars long and change chord every bar, on six progressions: Honey, Linen, Smoke, Porch, Dusk, Bloom. Each key carries two of them, and in each key every tuned category has a loop on both. The key and the progression are in the file name. The instruments play behind the beat too: the electric piano drags about 16 milliseconds, the guitar 12, the organ 10, the bass 6, with the timing and the touch moving a little on every note, while the pads stay put underneath. The electric piano plays the chords pushed ahead of the bar, held, stabbed, floating off the beat, rolled, or slid in from a semitone below - the gesture that marks the style - on six characters from warm and round to tremolo and digital. The bass sits in the pocket, walks, leaves space or moves through the seventh, and slides into the downbeat of every other bar, on seven characters from fretless and finger to upright, muted and sub. The guitar comps short chords, arpeggiates or answers the phrase, on three clean tones. The organ and keys hold, swell, push or slide into the chord, from a rotary organ and drawbars to a percussive snapping keyboard. The pads - four of them - hold the chord or breathe on the half bar, and the piano pushes, lays back or arpeggiates on a grand and an upright. The licks are short phrases from the minor pentatonic plus the ninth of the chord, with a chromatic grace note now and then: a call, an answer and a turn, half on electric piano and half on guitar. The finger snap loops sit on the backbeat, on ghost notes or lazily late, with ten snap characters from dry and tight to a doubled snap and a long hall. One shots: kicks, snares, claps, rimshots, closed and open hats, rides, crashes, shakers, tambourines, toms and finger snaps, bass on C2 and G1, and electric piano minor ninth chords on C3 and C4, plus riser and downer sweeps. How it was made. Every sound in the pack is synthesised, not sampled: the drums, percussion, finger snaps, piano and sweeps by our own sound-design code, and the electric piano, bass, guitar, organ, pads and licks played note by note on synthesizers. No sample libraries and no re-licensed recordings, nothing to clear - whatever you build with it is yours. Every melodic loop is one continuous performance, with the tail that rings past the end folded back onto the start, so it repeats without a gap. Nothing clips anywhere, every file keeps 3 dB of headroom, and the DC offset is below -65 dB on every file. Levels are balanced the way a record is balanced, not normalised flat - load any four files at unity and they already sound like a mix.