Monkey Business Audio

I keep my hands on you

Another Cymatics contest entry, this time for the 2024 SLAYER contest.

I got inspired by a vocal recording from the Slayer Beta Pack, which I've sped up from 135 to 165 BPM and created some harmony phrases for the bridge and the chorus (a 3rd above the original vocal melody). I've actually used the free audio editor Audacity for the time stretching, which - at least to my ears - produced the least artifacts.

The drums that I have sampled from a Roland TR 626 almost 30 years ago work like a charm on this one. Same goes for the electric guitar, a Hohner Rockwood LX100G I bought also 30 years ago. The pickups on that guitar are literally a bit rusty, but I love the crunchy sound of it and it fits the production perfectly.

Everything else has been taken from the Slayer Beta Pack by Cymatics, which you can download here: https://cymatics.fm/pages/slayer-beta-pack
The bass is a layered instrument I've created in Steinberg HALion 7 and it consists of 3 bass samples from the Slayer Beta Pack.
The bell-ish arp in the bridge and chorus is a Serum preset from the pack, all other sounds are single samples, either used directly (pitched to the correct note, of course) or as an instrument in a sampler track.

As always the complete production was done in Steinberg Cubase Pro. For mixing I've mainly used Steinberg stock plugins, plus a few from Waves. For mastering I've used the SSL Fusion VST plugins and Steinberg Raiser.

Enjoy listening!

Another Cymatics contest entry, this time for the 2024 SLAYER contest.
I got inspired by a vocal recording from the Slayer Beta Pack, which I've sped up from 135 to 165 BPM and created some harmony phrases for the bridge and the chorus (a 3rd above the original vocal melody). I've actually used the free audio editor Audacity for the time stretching, which - at least to my ears - produced the least artifacts.
The drums that I have sampled from a Roland TR 626 almost 30 years ago work like a charm on this one. Same goes for the electric guitar, a Hohner Rockwood LX100G I bought also 30 years ago. The pickups on that guitar are literally a bit rusty, but I love the crunchy sound of it and it fits the production perfectly.
Everything else has been taken from the Slayer Beta Pack by Cymatics, which you can download here: <a href="https://cymatics.fm/pages/slayer-beta-pack">https://cymatics.fm/pages/slayer-beta-pack</a>
The bass is a layered instrument I've created in Steinberg HALion 7 and it consists of 3 bass samples from the Slayer Beta Pack.
The bell-ish arp in the bridge and chorus is a Serum preset from the pack, all other sounds are single samples, either used directly (pitched to the correct note, of course) or as an instrument in a sampler track.
As always the complete production was done in Steinberg Cubase Pro. For mixing I've mainly used Steinberg stock plugins, plus a few from Waves. For mastering I've used the SSL Fusion VST plugins and Steinberg Raiser.
Enjoy listening!

I keep my hands on you by Monkey Business Audio

The Way It Was

This song was made in the context of the 2024 Cymatics Duality contest. It features Cymatics samples exclusively, almost all of them were taken from the DUALITY Beta pack, except for the reese bass and the supersaw in the drop, which use the "Cymatics - Legends - Oberheim OB-X - PAD Classic Saw Pulse - C.wav" sample from the "Pristine One Shots Preview Pack" and the dubstep basses, which come from the "100k Samplepack", "Synth Loops Vol. 2" and "Dubstep Starter Pack". Kick, snare and toms were created in Steinberg Backbone by splitting drum samples into tonal and noise components and layering the components of multiple samples.

This song was made in the context of the 2024 Cymatics Duality contest. It features Cymatics samples exclusively, almost all of them were taken from the DUALITY Beta pack, except for the reese bass and the supersaw in the drop, which use the "Cymatics - Legends - Oberheim OB-X - PAD Classic Saw Pulse - C.wav" sample from the "Pristine One Shots Preview Pack" and the dubstep basses, which come from the "100k Samplepack", "Synth Loops Vol. 2" and "Dubstep Starter Pack". Kick, snare and toms were created in Steinberg Backbone by splitting drum samples into tonal and noise components and layering the components of multiple samples.

The Way It Was(DUALITY Contest) by Monkey Business Audio

Voice Breath Heart and Soul

This piece rose from a single vocal recording of my girlfriend's soul singing and a recording of her heartbeat.
Every sound you hear has been hand-crafted from these recordings in Steinberg HALion 6, no other synths or samples involved.
Production was done in Cubase with Waves plugins for mixing and mastering.

I had 2 approaches to sound design on this project.

One was more of the creative/curious/random kind, where I utilized snippets from the original recording in the sampler or as a wavetable source. The "ah" choir pad (e.g. at 3:30) is a sample based instrument, the "oh-oh-yah-eh-ih-ye" pad (coming in at about 1:13 and 3:37) is a wavetable sound.

The other approach was more technical. I scanned through the recordings looking for "clean" or "pure" sine waves, saved them as wav files, ordered them by "cleanness" and created a wavetable out of them. For the other basic waveforms I used GNU Octave to create saw, square and triangle waveforms from the sine wave samples I saved earlier and also made wavetables from them. I scan randomly, but slowly through the wavetable to create a permanently changing sound source.

To create noise I collected everything from the recording that could be used as such, like breaths, f-, s- and sh-sounds and the like. I lined them all up on an audio track, added delay and reverb to diffuse the sound and make it more noisy. I layered a copy of the track on top of it, but shuffled the order of the samples and changed the reverb and delay parameters a bit. I repeated that process until I found the noise was dense enough. Finally I used an EQ to make it sound like white noise. I bounced the results to disk and got a roughly 45 seconds long noise sample, which I used in a sampler as noise source. The sample starts at a random position every time a note is triggered.

After that, the rest is essentially subtractive synthesis, modulation, layering and postprocessing.

This piece rose from a single vocal recording of my girlfriend's soul singing and a recording of her heartbeat.
Every sound you hear has been hand-crafted from these recordings in Steinberg HALion 6, no other synths or samples involved.
Production was done in Cubase with Waves plugins for mixing and mastering.
I had 2 approaches to sound design on this project.
One was more of the creative/curious/random kind, where I utilized snippets from the original recording in the sampler or as a wavetable source. The "ah" choir pad (e.g. at 3:30) is a sample based instrument, the "oh-oh-yah-eh-ih-ye" pad (coming in at about 1:13 and 3:37) is a wavetable sound.
The other approach was more technical. I scanned through the recordings looking for "clean" or "pure" sine waves, saved them as wav files, ordered them by "cleanness" and created a wavetable out of them. For the other basic waveforms I used GNU Octave to create saw, square and triangle waveforms from the sine wave samples I saved earlier and also made wavetables from them. I scan randomly, but slowly through the wavetable to create a permanently changing sound source.
To create noise I collected everything from the recording that could be used as such, like breaths, f-, s- and sh-sounds and the like. I lined them all up on an audio track, added delay and reverb to diffuse the sound and make it more noisy. I layered a copy of the track on top of it, but shuffled the order of the samples and changed the reverb and delay parameters a bit. I repeated that process until I found the noise was dense enough. Finally I used an EQ to make it sound like white noise. I bounced the results to disk and got a roughly 45 seconds long noise sample, which I used in a sampler as noise source. The sample starts at a random position every time a note is triggered.
After that, the rest is essentially subtractive synthesis, modulation, layering and postprocessing.

Voice Breath Heart and Soul by Monkey Business Audio

The One For You

All synthesizer sounds were hand-crafted with Cherry Audio's Voltage Modular
https://cherryaudio.com/free
using mainly Polymode, DCO-60, SynthVoice and MS-20

Presets from the song for Voltage Modular can be found in the Cherry Audio forum at
https://forums.cherryaudio.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1670

The vocals were taken from the free Cymatics Euphoria Vocal Sample Pack
https://cymatics-assets.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/2019/BlackFriday/BlackFriday/CymaticsEuphoriaVocalSamplePack-V4-h7y.zip

The TR-505 drum samples were downloaded from Oramics GitHub
https://oramics.github.io/sampled/DM/TR-505/

Recording, mixing and mastering were done in Cubase Pro using vintage gear emulations by Waves.

Enjoy listening...

All synthesizer sounds were hand-crafted with Cherry Audio's Voltage Modular
<a href="https://cherryaudio.com/free">https://cherryaudio.com/free</a>
using mainly Polymode, DCO-60, SynthVoice and MS-20
Presets from the song for Voltage Modular can be found in the Cherry Audio forum at
<a href="https://forums.cherryaudio.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&amp;t=1670">https://forums.cherryaudio.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&amp;t=1670</a>
The vocals were taken from the free Cymatics Euphoria Vocal Sample Pack
<a href="https://cymatics-assets.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/2019/BlackFriday/BlackFriday/CymaticsEuphoriaVocalSamplePack-V4-h7y.zip">https://cymatics-assets.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/2019/BlackFriday/BlackFriday/CymaticsEuphoriaVocalSamplePack-V4-h7y.zip</a>
The TR-505 drum samples were downloaded from Oramics GitHub
<a href="https://oramics.github.io/sampled/DM/TR-505/">https://oramics.github.io/sampled/DM/TR-505/</a>
Recording, mixing and mastering were done in Cubase Pro using vintage gear emulations by Waves.
Enjoy listening...

Monkey Business Audio Frankfurt am Main, DE