Early reports are in - It’s potentially killer .. The initial encoding gives some indication of the result but the final playback adds that crunch and drive that made the original sounds so powerful We have a brilliant chap called Harry Axton working on it and we’re looking at a fully repeatable workflow in the coming weeks - I’m now tempted to extend it to shakers, tambourines and even snares / Perc It all depends on how easy the chip encoding is - even looking into AI tools to help with that

Yes - we were a UK based dance act named after a Pub in the UK called the 'Freemasons Tavern' - We were most active around 2007 and had a long string of UK and international hits including Taking Beyonce, Kelly Rowland and Shakira to No1 across Europe - Nice to meet you

Let's look at this from workflow point of view. Modern digital meters do not clearly give you a target to work towards and it's resulted in people mixing way too hot, using a (totally free) metering system like this brings a balance target into your workflow that will build in headroom that allows plugins to work better and more suited to many sweet spots ( in the case of analog emulation ), You could just drop all signal levels, but you may not need to do it to all and it still won't solve the core problem - the in ability of the standard DAW meters to provide workable and really useful feedback. Too frequently, modern up-and-coming mixers concentrate on the individual parts and not balances. The art of getting a great working balance is getting lost in the see of tricks, tips, plugins etc. We can all agree that getting the optimum balance between elements is the very best way to mix, but often the modern DAW environments and in particular, the meters really don;t help us. Using this simple metering system can help you anchor your mix towards one point - Just try it - the technique is totally free thanks to the plugins that have K-14 on their meters - you may already have one ( Fabfilter suite for example )

This would mean that your kick drum is making decisions about your bass sound. Obviously, this is not ideal, but let's run with it. If you line up one note, with phase being a function of time, you would then have to go through and line up every other note in your bassline at a different relative position within the bar. Your kick is now making groove decisions on your bassline. Ninety-nine percent of basslines are not on the offbeat eighth, so this is going to be time-consuming. Next, you would have positive phase reinforcement when the bassline plays with the kick's tail, and if your bassline is one of the 99% that plays on some of the other sixteenths in a bar, this will create a lumpy response as the tail positively reinforces and jumps up in level. Also, if and when your bassline changes note, this will turn into interference, not phase reinforcement, and as phase is synergistic, all other notes will suddenly sound slightly weak, so you need to re-level for those. This can be dealt with manually (by now you would be best to have separated every note of the bassline onto separate tracks to control position and level). Now, obviously, sidechain will solve a lot of this, but please remember that there are millions of musicians out there, and nearly all of them don't make the same music as you. It's human nature to think as if everyone does, but in reality, heavy sidechaining is only used in a small club-based subset of producers, and now it's already becoming unfashionable in others (we need to cover everyone). But that also means with a fairly on-note bassline, you are generating a subsonic drone thanks to a fundamental playing constantly. In certain club venues, the wavelengths involved down there are annoyingly close to adjacent wall distances, and this can cause huge standing waves and a massive drop in response if your bassline changes note. But now let's come to mix - the very moment you apply any of the 95% of EQs that are not phase-linear to either the kick or bass, you throw all of the above work out of the window as EQs all work with tiny frequency-dependent delays (phase-linear EQs create large latencies to compensate for them but also cause pre-ringing which is something you definitely don't want on your kick/bass). This means you will have to go back and do all of the alignment again. If you then tweak the EQ or change it, you will need to do it again, etc. The same occurs generally with anything with a filter involved, so you will have to at least check for every single plugin you apply to either the kick or bass just to be sure. DAWs now all have latency compensation (modern mixing would be near impossible without it), but many plugins do not supply a perfectly accurate sample number for their process, so at any time, you might inadvertently be altering the phase relationship you worked so hard for (especially when grouping bass parts together), and you will only know by constantly re-checking. So now your kick drum has not only made sound design choices and restrictions for your bass but given you an enormous workflow and headache. Let me be very clear here - If you don't hard tune your kick to the most prominent note of your track, you don't have to do any of the above - at all. Yes, you still have to work hard, as all tracks have a bass end as unique as a fingerprint, but phase and interference are two very different effects. This whole concept has come about because it sort of makes sense - Everything should be in key with the track, right? ... Then it'll come together better. Well, let's look at the evidence - Just last month I picked up the Beatport top 10 to test and show a friend. Not a single track has its kick in any tuning relating to the key, even though some of the producers involved definitely thought they were. Why? Because 90% of commercially available or personally created kicks are nowhere near the tuning marked on the file name. If you use something like Vision 4X to check kicks, you will see most have a tail in motion over time. An oscillator in motion can be described as a vector; it's not ever at one single point but constantly moving through them. This is so common because kick generators like KICK2 do this straight out of the box - Producers think the envelope points are the 'key,' but they are just waypoints on a pitch envelope. You actually have to go to extraordinary lengths to find or create kicks with a totally static tail. There is a very prominent example though - the TR909 Kick. There is something you may not know about this sound - The 909 Kick left the factory on every machine tuned about 30-40 cents above a note in the standard western scale (It's F from memory, but I may be wrong). Now the 909 kick has been on classic club records for four decades now at this tuning without anyone storming out of the club asking for their money back because the kick's out of tune - Not even those with perfect pitch hear it (and it should be really obvious at that tuning). Why is this? It's because of human hearing and the maths/physics of frequency. Let's take the reference tone 440 Hz - an A4. The next octave up (A5) is 880 Hz. This gives 440 Hz between all 12 notes of that octave - that's an average of 36.6 Hz between each of the 12 notes (in practice it's not this as nothing in audio is in a straight line, it's the maths of exponentiality by default, but this is a good yardstick to show this effect). Let's go to the bottom octaves - A0 is 27.5 Hz and A1 is 55 Hz, that's 27.5 Hz to hold all 12 notes of the octave (or around 2.3 Hz on average for each note). This is a resolution difference of nearly 16 times. Now let's look at the human ear. The basilar membrane in the cochlea of the inner ear responds to different frequencies at different places along its length. This changes at lower frequencies as all human hearing is tuned from an evolutionary point of view to maximize results in the 500 Hz - 4 kHz range, as this is the area where humans can vocalize. We hear thanks to tiny hairs in our cochlea. These transduce mechanical vibrations into neural signals. The hairs are larger for lower frequencies and less densely packed in the region of the basilar membrane that responds to sounds below 150 Hz. This lower density means that fewer hair cells are activated by a given low-frequency sound, leading to less precise frequency discrimination. Human perception of pitch and frequency resolution is influenced by how the brain processes auditory signals. The auditory cortex, which interprets these signals, has more neurons dedicated to higher frequencies. This means that the brain can better distinguish between closely spaced high-frequency sounds compared to low-frequency sounds. You can try this for yourself - grab a pure sine wave and play notes below C2. Now try to vocalize them. Play 2-note chords in the lowest octaves, and then 2 octaves up - you'll see that you cannot hear the same relationship - you just hear beating. I'm sure larger animals that communicate with lower pitches, like whales, can, but we do not hear pitch the same way as we do in the upper bass, mids, and above. This is why you really do not need to hard tune your kick, why the 909 kick has worked on countless productions in any given key for all these years, and why this "pro tip" is one of the most dangerous pieces of information currently doing the rounds. If you still don't agree, go and check the output of successful club music - the evidence is everywhere that you don't need to worry about this ever again. I must though - really thank you for such a polite comment on this video. It's what spurred me on to reply in such detail as this is without a doubt the best way to debate and others here have certainly not been so pleasant. Have a great start to your week!

Sadly not quite yet, but please do bear with us as I am developing a new contact engine for K7 as the new effects are extraordinary inside sampler We’ve actually just got to wait for the user base to upgrade a touch further because currently contact seven isn’t adopted by everyone and we’re such a small company we can’t afford to develop seven and then find we just don’t sell enough. It’s a torturous conversion process from the logic where patches are created .

We’ve got form as have been doing this for a Linn drum and Oberheim Dx for a while but we needed to call in support here as the EPROM for the hats is hard to complete .. There’s a brilliant chap called Harry Axton helping us decode it .. Gotta be worth it - we emulated it in software and it’s quite something

It works a treat - for the F9 SNARE! pack we invested in real snares, and they alwasy record fairly dull compared to morern electronic production and this is our go-to technique to lift them up - do you have Saturn 2 ? - Happy to zap some starting presets over for you if so

Thank you for all your very kind comments - means an awful lot ot read this - This one in particular was a huge amount of work and we're very proud of it

It was something i worked out way too late - Not just kicks too - we're in an era of very short druym sounds at the moment - take a look at the lengths of all of your principal percussion and test a few things out - Kick a must though - I alwasy remember how good the DMX kick on Blue Monday sounds even now and it's an amazingly short kick as they all were in that era . I'm not suggesting going that short, but see how far you can go - your bassline will love you for it !

Wonderful to hear this - Any styles you’d like to see us cover in a future Stem set ?

A whole mixture including live recordings and even physical modelling .. I wil try and barin dump some techniques asap, Horns are particulrly intersting if using just Sampled horn patches - I play each part of the line in without quantise ( emulating the natural variance between players. ) and then edit everything for a good while . For disco, you need really short notes, but also you must know where the interplay comes from between those very short staccato notes and slightly longer ones - you need to do lots of homework on this by listening to the greats - earth wind and fire / Quincey jones / Salsoul are great starting points. There have been fashions in brass arranging over the year. Then If possible I'll edit the sampler patches to add random pitch detunes per note - only a few cents but this is what happens with a real brass section in full flight ( Trombones in particular ) and is alwasy missed by sample library creators . In Kontakt this is possible with the 1st Pitch module. I"ll also add a midi LFO thorwing out a very low level Bipolar Random wave sent to pitch bend. Mix wise - Pan the elements about in a shallow stereo position to emuate a line of brass, group and add some careful compression ( LA-2A or other slightly slower optical comp a great idea ) distortion, band limiting and stone room reverb is a great start, followed by some fab 70s plate reverb ( Super Plate by sound toys is the best ) ... and don't be afaid of peaking EQ to bring out the upper mids - again listen to classic records to see how they were mixed - by the time the tape had been over the heads a thousand times at the end of the 70s manual mix, a suprising amount of air was lost on most sources

Do you mean Phase out ? ..

How far in did you watch Alex ? - I get to the point very quickly in this as fully understand the relationship between phase, time and modern recording is vital but if you're new to it, you can't rush this - I'm not interested in creating Tik Tok styled sound byte videos, I want people watching to fully understand the concepts as from what I see people pick up surface technique without any real knowledge or wisdom about the physical principals involved - Phase is such an important concept to grasp as it's king in the bass end of all music mixing and production

Hi _ Sorry for the later reply - It's really tought getting authentic breaks with drum kit because of whats actually happening in a break - it's the interaction across time between the differnet elements , layers of harwdare based processing alongside the constant varitaion of drum hits from the live recordings invlved and it's why nearly every producer working with breaks utilises loops - Breakbeat and Loop production have always gone hand in hand and here we use multiple hardware compressors and processes to create these as well as real hit hats and snares - Until recently we've never been able to get this with drum kits where the hits are static but watch this space as we're making progresss - recently deleved right into snare recording techniques with multiple round robins and some tricks

​@@F9Audio Thanks for the explanation. I heard about hardware being a big part of the authenticity of the breaks before. Your answer explains everything. I indeed wondered why many producers used loops.

So glad you like them - they are hybrid - recorded with a couple of great players, some synth work, some layers from older Hardware romplers and a touch of physical modelling from a Yamaha VL-1

@@F9Audio Thanks for the info. Impressive. This pack is a real treat for anyone considering it, it's just filled with gems. That Kelly bass from the OB is worth the money on it's own :) I bought F9 previous coming from MPC, and these certainly raised the bar. Still trawling though it all. Thanks again man, love it.

Hi - These are encoded with the older version ( Using Ultarbeat behind the scenes ) but we will this year be updating as much as humanly possible on this front.