HOLLOW SUN offers a whole bunch of freebies for you to download and enjoy without restriction.

There are many varied and assorted sounds on offer - some are unique to the FreePacks area while some are tasters of products on sale. These are not 'lite' versions or compromised in any way. I hope you enjoy them.

A variety of formats are supported that include Alesis Fusion, Akai S5/6000, Z4/8, MPC4000, MPC5000V2 and Kontakt 3. Scroll down to select your format

FEATURED DOWNLOAD

Our featured download features some fantastic bass synth samples from the Novation Bass Station created by my Hollow Sun cohort, contributor and friend, Dan McCullough.

Released in 1993, the Bass Station was a monophonic analogue synth designed to emulate the Roland TB303 'BassLine' which had gained immense popularity in the dance music genre of the time. Whether it succeeded or not is debatable but the Bass Station was (and still is) a pokey little analogue monosynth - in fact, the 'Bass Station' monicker did it no favours because it was equally good at leadlines and other synth duties.

Lacking extensive facilities (basically just two VCOs feeding into a lowpass resonant filter and into an amp with two ADSRs and a single LFO to service them - no noise generator or fancy modulation) meant that it wasn't a terribly flexible synth (unlike, say, a Pro-One) but it made a good sound and one that's been captured well by Dan.

What's on offer here are 30 excellent synth bass sounds that cover a wide range of genres, uses and applications and which Dan has looped and programmed to perfection. Nothing fancy - just 30 solid synth bass sounds that sit nicely in a track.

But they cover the full keyboard range from C1-C7 and are therefore equally as useful as fruity analogue polysynth sounds and lead lines and the raw samples are open to much abuse by the more adventurous amongst you.

And in keeping with the Hollow Sun ethos, all the sounds have been carefully optimised by Dan to have minimum impact on RAM and disk storage and CPU strain making them fast and efficient

For Kontakt users, there's a bonus in that there are 90 programs and the programs have themed skins and some custom controls for quick tweaking. The 30 programs are presented as follows...

Click on the image to the left to see the full size Kontakt panel.

I am extremely grateful to Dan for this generous donation. Dan has secretly been behind the scenes for many of Hollow Sun's releases (in particular, many of the Fusion releases) and he donates his time and talent to Hollow Sun and the wider community freely and altruistically. He's one of a rare breed - someone you can depend on to deliver the goods with no ulterior motive and his enthusiasm knows no bounds. This soundset is up to his usual, exacting standard and frankly, this should be 'payware' but Dan is happy for it to be a freebie.

If this Freepack piques your interest, may I suggest that you check out Novation's Bass Station VSTi which will give you more of these sounds in spades ... or perhaps Novation's 'V-Station' plug-in. I worked on both of these products with some programmer friends of mine and the software equivalents are almost indistinguishable from their hardware counterparts.

I hope you enjoy these free sounds ... as does Dan.