The full 'Giovani' collection from Bela D Media features a boys and a girls choir recorded independently in a beautiful church acoustic captured with the finest in analogue and digital recording technology and edited by those at the top of their game - no expense was spared in the recording and editing and programming of these childrens' angelic voices to create what is arguably THE most ethereal vocal sound available today. Various vowel sounds were recorded (ohs and ahs) as well as other vocal articulations.

What Bela D is kindly offering to the Fusion community is the boys choir articulating simple 'ohs' and 'ahs' in four simple programs created by Hollow Sun - 'oh', 'ah', and an 'oh/ah' articulation controlled by the modwheel and a velocity switched 'oh/ah'. A far cry from the full 'Giovani' or even the 'LE' versions, of course, but totally sublime and beautiful sounds in their own rght.

You can find out more about 'The Giovani Edition - Voices Of The Young' HERE and you can discover more about Bela D Media's many other innovative products HERE.

I am extremely grateful to Bela D Media for granting me permission to share these gorgeous sounds with the wider Fusion community. This truly makes Fusion unique in the market as the only hardware product to feature these sounds. If these 'tasters' whet your apetite, be sure to check out the full version.

The samples are laid out from C1-C4 with normal samples in the MIDI velocity range of 0-110 and slurs, sweeps and other performance nuances in the MIDI velocity range of 111-128. Three programs are provided: a 'straight' bass, a distorted bass and a flanged bass.

Many thanks to Mark for making this excellent and very playable bass available to the Fusion community.

Knob 3 allows you to add a hint of chorus and Knob 4 allows you to control the amount of reverb. In keeping with original harpsichords, the programs are not particularly velocity sensitive (though this can be adjusted if you prefer).

Be sure to find out more about the wonderful workings of harpsichords HERE. In the meantime, have your womenfolk wear their wimples back to front and baroque and roll!

This Freepack is a little Christmas gift for Fusioneers - it's a very nice and authentic set of samples taken from a certain 'classic electric piano'! It is multi-sampled and also velocity layered with three levels (pp, mf and ff). It has the 'tinkly' upper range and a mellow and 'plummy' mid to low range.

It has a room reverb and chorus added by default but these can be reduced/removed using assignable knobs 3&4. Assignable knobs 1&2 transforms the sound into a mellow pad. S1 introduces tremolo and S2 adds the characteristic autopan.

I am grateful to Tracy Collins of Indiginus for donating the samples from his own 'classic electric piano'. He made them available to the Akai S5/6000 community but was happy to let the Fusion community have them as well.

Merry Christmas to all!

Something of a departure this time round - a collection of assorted guitars that include overdriven and crunch distortion, acoustic, 12-string, nylon, jazz and guitar harmonics.

These are very economical and were taken from my old S1000 library, re-worked in my S5000 then converted to Fusion where they took on a life of their own!

The assignable knobs have been carefully set to get the best from the sounds and S1 in the distortion guitars introduces a 5th interval

Back in 1978, Texas Instruments, innovators in integrated circuit design and manufacture, released the now legendary Speak & Spell, a teaching aid for children to assist them with spelling and reading. This might seem a very unlikely 'instrument' to feature here but because artists such as Kraftwerk and others used the Speak & Spell's crude speech synthesis in their music, it (sort of) qualifies ... if only tenuously.

The idea with the Speak & Spell was that it would 'speak' words at random and the child would then be required to spell it using the 'keyboard'. If the child got it right, he/she would be told - otherwise they'd be informed "INCORRECT". For the time, it was actually quite a sophisticated little mini-computer with a large vocabulary of stored words, letters and numbers that were replayed in truly glorious, grungy lo-fi 8-bit through a rather crappy on-board speaker. In other words, sound quality was pretty awfu!!

Fortunately, the young, evolving human brain is sophisticated enough to extrapolate and not to imitate blindly otherwise there would be a whole generation of people talking like Professor Steven Hawkins!

I admit - it's probably not for everyone but it's a lot of fun!

You can see and play an on-line Flash version of the Speak & Spell here

The 50s sci-fi film 'Forbidden Planet'  is a seminal piece of cinematic history not just because it's a great movie (based on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest') but also because of the revolutionary electronic music soundtrack created by avant-garde pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron.

In a time long before commercially available synthesisers and/or multi-track tape machines, the Barrons made their own circuits and assembled the sounds they made into collages using music concrete techniques (intricate tape splicing, etc.). Built in to these various circuits, however, was a certain degree of unpredictability and serendipity - that is, their circuits had flaws and imperfections and didn't always behave as expected - and the results created a certain 'organic' quality that belie their electronic origins. However, if anything, this was a strength that the Barrons exploited to highlight the human flaws in the characters in the film or, indeed, the unpredictability of the alien landscape depicted.

It was also the first movie to have a totally electronic soundtrack AND it was credited as such ... as 'Electronic Tonalities' ... and it was a major influence on the use of electronic music in the movie industry even to this day!

I used to use Native Instruments' REAKTOR to design and build my own 'circuits' in software in a similar vein to the Barrons' ethos - to create 'organic' instruments that can generate eerie soundscapes almost at random and which have an unpredictable life of their own. On offer here is a collection of samples from these instruments.

I make no claim that any of these sci-fi samples are authentic recreations of the Barrons' work but during the time these samples were available for Akai samplers, a close friend of Bebe Barron emailed me to tell me that they are "Very much in the spirit of Forbidden Planet, and in most cases dead ringers for the original" and it seems had Bebe's approval! Although her husband died some years ago, last thing I heard was that Bebe was still active in the avant-garde electronic music field.

All the sounds are single samples recorded at C3 but mapped out across the keyboard range. As a result, they will speed up and slow down if transposed but this is perfectly in keeping with the Barrons' original work who used different tape speeds to affect the playback of their recordings.

These are not sounds for your next MTV hit that's for sure (although you never know!) but if you want to push the envelope with ambient soundscapes, these might be just the ticket.

This Freepack features some sounds from a Kawai K5000 from a donation made to Hollow Sun a few years ago by Brian Thomson of stereoroid.com and which were available at Hollow Sun for free download for some time and which I've decided to resurrect for Fusion.

The K5000 was an additive synthesiser that offered control of up to 128 harmonics and multi-stage envelopes could be used to control the level of these. The harmonics could also be detuned to animate the sound. The resulting waveform then passed through a filter and there were the usual complement of LFOs, etc., to further augment the sound. Unlike their previous additive synths, Kawai added PCM samples to the equation. It sounds very comprehensive and it had some fabulous sounds but to construct your own was a nightmare - you could sit there for hours messing with the individual hamonics' levels and it almost inevitably sounded like a bloody organ!

The five sounds in this Freepack certainly don't, however, with sonorous and delicate bells, evolving digital synth sounds and one that has a pretty good go at sounding warm and analogue. The Assignable Knobs are programmed to make quite dramatic and useful changes quickly and easily.

This Freepack contains 24 sounds from the Hollow Sun M01 Collection CD and features a wide range of sounds (although in fairness, many are atmospheric pads and otherwise 'dreamy' sounds!!).

Many sounds are new, created using Fusion's powerful onboard synth processing and multi-FX and the assignable controls are sympathetically programmed to transform the sounds with minimum tweakage.

When the Prophecy was released in 1996, it caused quite a stir being the only monophonic synth to have hit the market for some time and also the first synth to use new 'modelling' techniques. Looking at its control panel, it is clear that this was designed as a performance instrument with all sorts of performance controls and performance controllers such as wheels, ribbon controllers, a unique 'log' controller, aftertouch, etc.. It found immediate favour with many musicians and although discontinued a long time ago, is still a staple in many people's rigs.

What we have here are eight sounds created by HS cohort, Roberto Puricelli. Being samples, it is not possible to interact with the sounds in the same way as the original but Rob has used Fusion's on-board processing with the assignable controls and other performance parameters to go some way to re-creating the experience of the original.

All sounds are monophonic to re-create the original. This is easily changed if you prefer.

This download comes courtesy of Indiginus who have very kindly created a 'lite' version of their Solid State Symphony 'Orchestra' patch for Fusion. Despite being 'lite', it's still a very impressive sound with a wide range of applications!

It's essentially a velocity-switched orchestral sound but the twist is that it is made entirely using carefully layered analogue synths. The result is surprisingly authentic providing a rich orchestral texture of strings and brass in unison.

Although comprising one basic sound, several program variations have been created. The first program is the original velocity switched orchestra whilst the 'P' and 'F' variations feature just the soft and loud multisamples. Further programs are created using Fusion's own ROM presets to provide SSS and strings, SSS and choir plus other variations.

I am extremely grateful to Tracy Collins of Indiginus for making this available to the growing Fusion community.

In contrast to the previous freepack, here's an altogether simpler download - a selection of classic sounds from almost the dawn of sampling.

In the beginning was the Fairlight, a powerful digital synthesiser but best known for its sampling facilities. Emu Systems (who previously made large modular analogue synths) figured out that sampling would be fairly easy to achieve and so the original (and imaginatively named) 'Emulator' was born, a simple and limited sampling keyboard with few sound shaping facilities. This was followed up by the Emulator II (or EII) that offered typical synth processing facilities as well but with a price tag of around £10,000!!!

Big and chunky with sounds loaded from 5.25" floppy disks, many aspiring musos dreamed of owning one. One such musician was Jem Godfrey who very kindly donated a selection of sounds from his own EII which have been converted to Fusion format. These include the legendary 'Shakuhachi' that graced many a record at the time (most notably Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer') plus some strings, choirs and an eerie 'Waterphone'. Despite their age (they'll be 22 this year!), they still sound remarkably good today especially when enhanced with Fusion's own facilities.

Because of the limited range of samples in some sounds (in some cases, just one!), not all of them cover the entire keyboard range and also work within limited transposition but this is true to the originals.

Find out more about the EII here.

A somewhat different download for Fusion this time! Instead of yet more synth sounds, a meticulously finger picked acoustic guitar and chordal strums that allow an astonishingly realistic performance as evidenced in the audio demos below.

The samples come courtesy of new sound developer Indiginus who have kindly agreed to make these fabulous sounds available to Fusion users in a co-promotional effort. Indiginus's full CD-ROM contains much more variation with nylon-strung and 12-string guitars. All are meticulously multi-sampled with clever use of velocity switching to introduce mutes, harmonics, open strings and performance slides. Frankly, one of the best acoustic guitar sample collections I have heard and which I have no hesitation in recommending!!

More material is on the way from this innovative developer and I recommend you check out their website for more details by clicking on the logo below.

Eight intricate, evolving pads from the Hollow Sun FS1R Collection converted to Fusion and carefully hand crafted to take advantage of Fusion's extensive on-board synth and FX processing capabilities. The download is quite a bit larger than others because all the multi-samples are stereo and quite long in order to capture the expansive sound of the original.

My thanks (as always) to Martijn Buiter for the original samples he supplied in this unique collaboration.

An unusual assortment of sounds here that you definitely won't find on your typical workstation.... samples of a quite 'ethnic' Buddhist origin.

All samples were provided by Hollow Sun cohort Dan McCullough from his collection of original instruments.

Whilst these samples cover the entire keyboard range, some don't transpose that well above C6 by their very nature. This is not a limitation of Fusion - the same artefacts would manifest themselves on any sampler.

Two delightful FM patches sent in by Fusion user, Luc Henrion, that replicate original DX electric piano presets.