EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

Hi,

*** Legal Disclaimer ***

All the material used in the following patches is completely sampled by my
own. If you find yourself using it on some millionseller (which, considering
the sonical quality of the material, I doubt will happen), feel free to do
so. If you want to give it further, feel free to do so as well. You can even
modify and tweak it to death if that's your obsession. Just don't sell it
(but well, you wouldn't want to do that anyways, see above...).
I hereby also disclaim that I am not responsible for any hearing damage,
caused by any tasteless sounds that eventually might reach your ear.

*** End ***

Preparation:
- Download http://www.saschafranck.de/exs/PadStuff.zip
- In case you didn't download this before, you will also need the samples
from http://www.saschafranck.de/exs/KrissLoop.zip if you would like to
listen to the groove as well. No need to care about the other files in
there, just the samples are required.
- Unzip to your EXS's preferred drive (in case you have one specified in the
EXS Instrument Editor under "Edit > Preferences") to let the EXS find the
samples.
- Make sure to maintain the directory structure while unzipping.
- While loading the song, don't wonder, Logic will tell you to update your
program and that the song was created using a newer version. Just click OK,
the song loads fine in 4.8.1.

Not that there's too many special things going on in this song or with the
used patches, but I just wanted to demonstrate how I sometimes tweak
padsounds.

First thing to say is that this pad is nothing special. The two used samples
actually are distorted guitar tones that I recorded and looped
(unfortunately the higher sample doesn't loop that properly which one may
notice in the higher registers, but in context it still works). Then I
doubled the zones, panned and detuned them a bit.
Amp ADSR is pretty much what you expect for a pad sound. Also the rest of
the settings aren't that special.
The pad however lives up a bit because I made more or less intense use of
the modwheel routing options and the tempo sync feature of the LFOs. LFO2 is
used for timed panning (quarter notes), turning up the modwheel slightly
increases the effect. LFO1 is used for tempo offset of the filter (32nd
notes). With the LFO2 doing some panning this effect gets a bit more
dramatic.

Then I'd like to mention that I did quite some transforming to have better
realtime tweaking abilities. I routed 4 of my SY85 faders to some
parameters. Two of them simply adress the pad channel's sends while the
other two are routed to EXS parameters. One is controlling the ADSR via
Velocity parameter, which IMO gives a slightly better controll about how
much the filter ADSR is adressed than simply controlling cutoff or so (which
results in a not so nice "stepping" sound anyways, as the EXS filter cutoff
isn't smoothed like for instance the ES1 filter is). The other one is mapped
to the Filter LFO via Modwheel intensity. With this I can easily control how
much the modwheel affects the LFO, therefor either getting a smoother or
more drastical effect without having to be too careful with the wheel.
And finally I transformed program changes into CC 103 which is controlling
the LFO1 waveform. I like switching between them quite a bit.
Fwiw, this mapping is part of my Autoload and you can see it on screenset
#5.

A last note on my effect/bus routing. On bus 2 you will find a stereo delay
which I almost allways use in such or a similar setting for pads. Bus 1
however contains a FatEQ thinning out the sound, a pitch shifter (that's
what the EQ is good for) set to +12, completely wet, followed by an
Ensemble. The complete bus 1 is running through bus 2. I could have used
another delay on it, which would give a bit more control, but I found
everything pretty much sufficient that way. Turning up bus1 now results in a
nice swirling effect and when I tried such a setting for the first time I
was a bit of astonished as the not-so-good pitch shifter was doing a pretty
fine job in this configuration.

You will notice that there are a lot of tracks playing through the EXS pad,
and I have to admit that I couldn't do everything in realtime, a) because
I'm a miserable keyboardist (git player here) and b) because there was too
much stuff going on.
But all the parameter automation was recorded in one take, I just extracted
the individual parameters to extra sequences to finetune them a bit and to
give you a better overview.

Oh, one last word, I'm using a buffersize of 256 samples which is giving me
6ms of latency.
Maybe important for some automations, but any reasonably small buffersize
should lead to proper results as there are almost no fast CC changes. CPU
usage was like 20% over here.

Maybe this is all dead boring for you experienced keyboarders, but I had my
fun.

Cheers,
Sascha