Sub Level

Sub Level is for the room with no stage, where the system is too big for the space and the bass arrives before the music does. Hard, swung, built on weight rather than on chords. If you build around the Night Bass end of the floor, or the harder UK side where garage and house meet, this pack was voiced for that room. The bass is the pack. Ninety-six playable one shots across two families and three registers. The first family is the ladder filter - a four pole with the feedback through a saturator, the circuit that has made bass lines growl since the seventies. Its resonance SUBTRACTS below the cutoff, and that is not a flaw, it is the sound: it is why an acid line is thin and a deep line is full. Twelve characters, from the plucked to the vocal ones, where a bank of vowel resonators sits on top of the filter and the bass talks. The second family is the opposite decision. Low cutoff, resonance almost off, the sub sitting on the note: ninety-eight per cent of their energy is below 120 Hz against seventy-four in the first family. They are the floor under everything else, and they have their own folder. The drums come from the harder side of the machine. Fourteen groove recipes and thirteen kits, and three of the four written for this genre do not put the kick on every beat: the two step of UK garage leaves the two and the four to the bass, and the half time drops to two kicks a bar. The hats skip instead of running, and the open hat lands on the last sixteenth of the beat where it pushes the next kick instead of filling the gap. The kick is short and flat on purpose. It does not sweep down like a tom and it does not sit on the sub, because the sub is where the bass lives. Twenty four of them, each in two tunings. Thirty six synth hits come from two operator FM, where the harmonics are BORN from the modulation instead of being carved out by a filter. The vocals are chopped, not sung: open vowels and diphthongs, sixty six of them across loops and one shots, in ten keys. 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. The drum loops carry half of their low energy between 40 and 90 Hz, which is the body of the kick and not the sub. Nothing clips: the highest peak in 643 files is -0.51 dBFS. 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. What's inside: 346 loops and 297 one shots. Loops are 90 Full Drum, 78 Stripped Drum, 66 Top, 54 Percussion, 30 Vocal Chop, 14 Risers, 14 Downers. One shots are 48 Bass, 36 Bass Deep, 36 Synth Hits, 36 Vocals, 24 Kicks, 24 Hi Hats, 12 Claps, 12 Snares, 12 Shakers, 12 Impacts, 9 Rides, 9 Congas, 9 Bongos, 6 Toms, 6 Rimshots, 6 Woodblocks. Every category has its own folder. 643 files, 130 BPM, WAV 24-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo. ACID tempo metadata on all 643 files, sampler loop points on all 346 loops. Loops are 2 bars, zero-crossing trimmed. The highest peak in the pack is -0.51 dBFS.