Synthwave Midnight Chrome

The drums are straight, with no swing: the kick on the one and the three, with pushes and one four-on-the-floor figure, the snare on the two and the four. The snare carries the gated reverb of the decade - a dense room more than two seconds long, cut dead after about a quarter of a second - and the claps have it too. 6 groove recipes, each with its own kick, snare and hat figure, in six kits - Outrun, Chrome, Arcade, Midnight, Cassette and Vapor. Full, stripped, top, percussion and hi-hat loops are separate folders, and 24 one-bar fills - tom falls, rolls, doubles, stutters, accelerating rolls and ride builds - lead into the next bar. The bass is an analog voice with detuned oscillators, playing octaves on the eighths, straight sixteenths, gallops, fifths and walks, in sixteen characters. The arps run the chords in sixteenths and eighths, up, down, broken and by octave, on eight analog characters. The leads are a monophonic analog voice that plays the whole phrase, not a string of separate notes: legato notes glide into each other, the vibrato comes in after the attack, two or three oscillators drift and detune differently on the left and right channels, and the filter opens on every note. Three characters - a pulse with moving width, a slow-opening brass and a soft closed tone. The FM electric piano plays the chords held, pumped, pushed or on the off-beat, in four voicings - close, open, wide and without the root - with the bell of the attack that defined the keyboards of the time. The pads are wide and slow, in six characters, with a bright saw-like spectrum and a slow vibrato that moves like an analog chorus, and they loop without a seam. The tuned loops are four bars long and change chord every bar, on six progressions: Outrun, Night, Drive, Neon, Coast, Chase. Outrun is the classic i-VI-III-VII. Each key carries three of them, and in each key every tuned category has a loop on each of those three. The key and the progression are in the file name. One shots: kicks in two tones, gated snares and claps, closed and open hats, rides, crashes, toms, impacts, bass in three registers and synth hits - minor chords on the FM electric piano in two registers, with the root in the file name - plus riser and downer sweeps. What makes all of it different is how it was made. Every sound is synthesised from scratch by our own DSP code, not sampled. No re-licensed libraries, nothing to clear. That makes the pack original, and it means whatever you build with it is yours. It also means every decision was deliberate, and measurable. Nothing clips anywhere, every file keeps 3 dB of headroom, and the DC offset is below -75 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.