Free: Gogodze Phu Vol II
Our second entry in the KVR Developer Challenge, following 2016's Marie Ork, and second entry in the Gogodze Phu series of the ghosts of drum sounds fading into the mists of history. Gogodze Phu Vol II is inspired mainly by the lo-fi and dead drum sound on Kim Jung Mi's 1973 album "Now". Not many people really want drums that are that lo-fi all the time, though, so we took the recordings and made a variable-fidelity kit, not by applying typical lo-fi effects but only by messing with the phase, mix and tuning of the seven microphones we recorded everything with.
Every kit piece is sampled with the same seven mics. There's a kick, a snare with sidesticks, center hits and edge hits, three really deadened toms, and a hi-hat with five degrees of openness plus foot chiks. There are two basic mixes here. The "47" mix does vintage mixes from four to seven mics. It can do Glyn Johns, Glyn Johns plus one mic in front of the kit (generally our favorite sound) and all seven mics. The fidelity knob controls microphone phase offset. At 100%, everything is perfectly in phase, and the speed of sound is effectively infinite. We're not just violating musical tradition here, but totally disrespecting the laws of physics, too, because we like how it sounds.
The "13" mix is even dirtier, starting with just a very retro Shure SM-55 vocal mic in front of the kit, and optionally adds the overhead and a mic aimed sideways at a wall with big windows. In its case, the fidelity knob controls high-pass filtering on the main mic on the non-kick sounds, and the phase alignment of the other two mics. 1701 total samples, adding up to over 400 MB extracted.