Download from Bandcamp

Welcome to Building Blocks, a sample pack series focusing on authentic fat, gritty, analog sounds, influenced by the bass heavy Drum & Bass sound of the early 2000's. Every sample has been created on a wealth of analogue and digital hardware for that authentic raw hardware sound of that era.

Second in the Building Blocks sample series is a collection of 160 drum loops, recorded across 3 vintage drum kits, recorded on high end hardware equipment and meticulously sequenced. I've always been a fan of recording live drums as opposed to using samples as I really enjoy the process as well as creating a very malleable custom sound. I've sequenced them in a way to capture that live organic Raiden drum sound.

These drum loops were produced by recording single hits from 3 separate vintage drum kits each with their own unique sound. The Ludwig drum kit has a classic sound of the 1960s and was recorded with loud room mics for an ambient open sound. The Premier drum kit is a hybrid kit made up of Yamaha and Premier parts that has a tight punchy sound, with a slightly crunchy hi hat. Blackwood is a minimal custom dub kit with a rounded monster sound, the snare is particularly unique on this kit. These drum hits were recorded using a collection of expensive vintage microphones via a Trident 88 console and Neve style 1073 preamps that were slightly over driven. 16 velocity layers per drum were recorded to capture the dynamics of the kits.

These loops are building blocks for you to cut up, programme and process. There is much room for further development as these loops have not been over processed with eq, saturation and compression, just enough to get you going. There is no quantising here so these loops can also be used as groove templates to be applied to other arrangements. All the drum loops are sequenced at 170bpm. I hope you enjoy them and if you make anything cool with the samples I'd love to hear it!

Equipment used for this particular sample pack:
Ludwig Drum Kit
Premier / Yamaha Drum Kit
Blackwood Custom Kit
Trident 88 Mixing console
Aurora Audio GTP8 Preamps
SSL G Series Eq
Kush Audio Electra Eq
1176 Compressors
BSS 402 Compressor
Valley Dynamite Compressor
Lexicon MPX1 Multi-fx
Sansamp PSA1 Saturator
Eventide Space Reverb
Vermona Retroverb Spring Reverb

Relaunch [2021] curated by Chris Jarman aka Raiden aka Kamikaze Space Programme aka (1/2 Dot Product)

Brutal industrial sound design alongside intrinsic field recordings and sleeker, low tempos & frenetic energy of jungle, breakbeats and drum and bass, Jarman’s ability to manoeuvre between genres and style sees the music defy classification while spiralling from one spectrum of sound to the next