As promised, welcome to ADR3-N's free producer stuff emporium, aka the primo magazine of my data hoarding habits and sample projects! If you're new here, check out Januarylist 2024's producer giveaways -- it's basically the same thing, but last month. ;)

There's also Decemberlist 2023, Septemberlist 2023, Novemberlist 2021, and finally Octoberlist 2021. That's three years of freebies! Holy cow, I'm getting old, but still check them out. You never know what may still be around, or what you can find with a little googling!

This month's issue would not be complete without a million special thanks to the NG Audio Pub gang, audio forum recommendations, honorable mentions, and market research; check out the bottom of this page if that's your thing.

If you find this post helpful, please consider donating on ko-fi and Patreon. 💙 It's thanks to my supporters that I have the time to do music, samples, AND megalists like these. I owe you a lot!

Without further ado, onto the list!

Huge News -- All my best sample projects are now FREE!

Thanks to my wonderful supporters, I've been able to release Take My Cymbals AND all three of my big sample projects in one place! No longer do you have to dig through my newsposts and audio page to find ADREANALINE, CTK-2400, and Saudade Drums. I've repackaged everything and dropped them all to beatstars for FREE!

Get them here!

What's the catch?

Nothing. Just making these babies easier to find. You can check out the project details and demos for each right in the beatstars "store."

In short, I'm offering 4 sample libraries/instruments: a 503 sample cymbal library, metal drum set, key library for sforzando, and my flagship industrial samurai hip-hop pack, ADREANALINE (beta).

Anonymous downloads enabled for those who like their privacy. Samples are in wav format.

What's New?

3 things. CTK-2400 (lo-fi keys) is available FREE for the first time ever, unless you count giving it away to finalists of NGADM/NGUAC 2023. The full version was $15 when I first dropped it.

ADREANALINE has some new samples and fixes. This pack is the foundation for a lot of my greatest hip-hop tracks and my baby. I plan to expand it in the future. Open for requests!

Take My Cymbals is a NEW acoustic cymbal library, designed for loading up into your sampler and writing completely natural, expressive cymbal tracks. I intended it for Nu Metal and boombap but it ended up capable of much, much more. It has a wide variety of professional grade, rare, and niche cymbals -- with BONUS kicks, snares, toms, and even cardboard boxes.

Newgrounds demo

This project took a year of research, searching for cymbals of various weights, and milling through over 1000 recordings. Samples were sourced from a variety of settings, processed for uniformity and occasionally salvaged by release-extension using frequency selection from blueprints. (felt super accomplished when I learned how to do this!)

My original vision was 5 or 6 multi-sampled cymbals, and it was a lot of work, but I'm happy to say it far exceeds not only my expectations but many PAID libraries I own. Special thanks to @MariogD on for helping make this possible and being my top supporter on ko-fi!

Also extra, extra thanks to everyone who commissioned me for audio critique the past few months, @JimmytheCaterpillar, @LD-W, SparkdaPhilly, and Emcdouble. It was the extra push I needed!

More about requesting content reviews (free and paid) here.

Or if you're a rock/hip-hop producer looking to get playlisted, check out this post.

I try to help independent producers out in any way I can, including resources, advertising, discounts on distribution, mastering, etc. If you need something, let me know!

STILL MORE FREEBIES

POISE PERCUSSION SAMPLER - One of the coolest samplers I've ever seen. It has 16 percussion pads, with a catch, 8 samples per pad (including support for round robins!) Most samplers only support one sample per pad. Poise will support 156 samples, 16 x 8. So you could make a drum kit out of it with 8 velocity layers a piece. Sounds like a great stock plugin replacement to me.

On the same page as Poise, you can also check out Grace Sampler, made for a particular group of people in mind: those who like making their own patches. You can even import SFZ patches. How about that?

The caveat is that export function is locked to proprietary software by Chicken Systems (paid versions). If you're not looking to sell your patches, this shouldn't be a problem. If that IS an issue, TX16WX is your friend, and there's this handydandy usermade converter.

Little aside, if you're a fan of Cymatics, as I am, they have compiled a list of free kits and have some new ones on the market every few months. There's also a freebie list on their sample collections.

METAL PRODUCTION FREEBIES

Excuse the choppy writing for this section. I was really, really excited and figured I'd drop links to videos to let this section speak for itself. I came across some unbelievable free stuff for metal prod. You'll want to check out:

Death Dealer Drums

Free Metal Drumkit Plugin | Death Dealer by Fire Portal

Steve Terreberry (the man, the myth, the legend) has a lil amp sim that don't sound half bad!

Brutal Bass all in one, GROWLER from AugustRose Audio. Also check out their page for the Howler

ML Drums has a free version -- that you can cheaty-cheat into having more cymbals than it's supposed to with separate tracks and midi routing.

I've enjoyed TMKD's metal drums for years. They're still around. Check them out!

Aaaaand KRIMH Drums FREE Edition by Bogren Digital

Krimh Drums Free – Bogren Digital

Note all of these freebies are super relevant for a trend emerging in current hip-hop -- genre-fusion.

Hip-hop and metal have always had a lot of cross over, if you remember Children of the Korn. If you're interested in trying on a heavy metal flavor for your hip-hop, or you're looking to expand your library of guitars, look no further. There are plenty of free options for that too.

AmpleSound Freebies -- Bass and acoustic Taylor. The bass in particular can be pitch shifted before running through your amp of choice for a NASTY tone!

Junk Guitar by Junk Spider is no longer available, formerly my favorite guitar freebie, but you may be able to go down a rabbit hole and find it. In the case you can't, as I haven't yet (and I'm looking to find the licensing to see if I can just throw it up on drive) these reads are your friend.

Reddit (INSTR) // Guitar Clan (FX) // Unison (INSTR, writeups)

It may also be worth noting that metal and hip-hop ALSO love to incorporate big cinematic, orchestral, and choral elements. I'm sure I've written about these over the years, but don't just read up on me -- keep an eye out!

MORE FREEBIES (FX) for various, sound design

Thanks to coinxdaproducer on YouTube for these recommendations!

Red Bass - add some sub to your instruments/samples. And it sounds freaking great. The free version comes with a non-intrusive banner to remind you to support the developer if you really like it!

This freeware/pay-what-you-want plugin directly competes with paid plugins like Submarine vst (a $35-90 value!) If you're shopping around for sub-bass plugins, this KVR thread may be of interest to you.

Soundly Place it - useful for sound design, emulating spaces like basements, speakers like radios and earbuds, outside a club, etc. I can see this coming in CLUTCH as a master effect for transitions!

PRISMA - unprecedented 4 band multi-effect processor, gain, clip, width, distortion, folding, and all sorts of effects offered. Ugly interface, gorgeous effects.

Ruina - part of the Frequel bundle from noise engineering. Probably the most unique distortion and degradation plugin I've seen in all my years, and beats a lot of paid alternatives.

What makes it worth the registration, (simple) download manager, and probably password change to log in if you're like me and forgot yours, is the multiple effects this bad boy brings to the table. There is MASSIVE potential for modulating every effect for transitions. Just look at it!

Sorry if this image comes up with a big transparent chunk at the bottom -- I can't get it to go away lol. Moving on.

@Leavesz recommendations (INSTRUMENTS and FX), quotes in italics

These are some that I use very frequently:

synth1 : it is very basic and a little outdated but it does its job pretty well, aside from some old software quirks here and there. If you're scared of programming a synth patch you can check out this very simple preset pack for it, I used it a lot before I learned how to make my own patches.

kilohearts essential bundle : it has various effect plugins that might come in handy if your DAW doesn't already have them.

melda free fx bundle : same concept as the previous but a bit more advanced in some areas and you can't save presets.

TokyoDawnLabs : There are a couple of very useful mixing and mastering tools at the bottom of the page that you can grab for free. I don't do serious mastering very often but whenever I try to I always throw the slickEQ somewhere in the chain.

libjuicysfplugin : it loads sf2 files. There are a couple sf2 piano libraries that I found to be really neat when compared to other dedicated VSTs I've tried: Here are a couple nice sounding piano libraries, and a pretty nice rhodes sf2.

4Front Rhode : Here's a rhodes vst if you don't like soundfonts. It sounds nice with a bit of delay and distortion.

I had spitfire labs installed at some point so that gets an (un)honourable mention, but imo it's a bit of a waste of space and if you're working on an older and slower machine it will eat your cpu and crash your daw. I suppose it might be fine otherwise because the sound quality IS very good.

I don't know what your skill level is so you might already know about some of these but eh, I could not resist the opportunity to write a list lol.

From <https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1531869>

@Synami on the NG Audio Pub recommended Outobugi's freebies

There are a ton of goodies, a clipper, an all in one drum processor, a la Diablo, and even a Skyrim UI mod. Definitely worth checking out. Donation ware alert!

For a well organized, super helpful resource list, see @LD-W's blog - FREE Audio Resources List For Composers - 2022/2023

Also news from the NG audio pub Discord, we have this bad boy. Soundiron have released a FREE playable experimental organ called Aquae Organ!

"It's an interesting combination between parts of their £££-costing Alpha & Omega Pipe Organs together in unison, recorded with hydrophones in tall crystal vases. It also comes with basic waveforms to also merge with the Organ-stack for additional design-capabilities <@&883575627217780797> This is FREE Kontakt Player compatible"

Honorable mentions and old news

Producergrind search: free - I've mentioned this one before, but in case you haven't seen it, producer grind has free hip-hop kits, and lots of them. Grab 'em before they're gone. They start on the bottom of page 1!

CODEC - great for glitching and ruining your audio <30

TB-303 CLONE - Juce port of Robin Scmidt's Open303 DSP engine, modeled on the Roland 303.

Wursy - Sampleson is offering this subtractive old-school key synth for free, if you don't mind subscribing to their YouTube! Thanks to 300 LUFS on VK!

PNCH - From unplug.red, adds harmonics and a gating effect, without added pumping as with other gate plugins. Suggested use by the developer, removing amp hum from a guitar signal, like a stomp box. Also may be useful for drum breaks, for a "choppy effect"

The developer also has what appears to be a GameBoy sampler on his site, and several other plugins worth checking out. They are all provided for free with little unintrusive banners to remind you to support the developer.

Camel Crusher is back in town. Two types of distortion, low pass filter with resonance, and an interface so simple a caveman could do it. This link is a direct download. Thanks to Bedroom Producers Blog for the heads up it's still alive! Compatible with 32 and 64 bit win/mac. Discontinued.

MeowSynth - who doesn't like cats? Believe it or not, I tortured this plugin into the bass for "you're late for work"

DelayLama - widely regarded as one of the worst plugins on the planet, because people have been using it WRONG. Modulate all parameters but pitch, make 2 instances, apply pingpong delay, and you have a cool monophonic portamento bass/lead. It can also do dubstep wobbles when massaged well.

Used as a lead here in several places

And that temporarily concludes our list of freebies because I'm scared of the character limit and I gotta save some more for later! Moving onto our video category.

Videos 100% worth your time

The most hated FL Studio producer ever

How to make your reverb sound massive, the right way

How to mix better than 99% of producers -- session organization

Metal Drum Mixing, Krimh Drums

Market Research:

As a beat and samplemaker, you can't go wrong with checking out the competition. Here's some stuff I felt was interesting. Look at the presentation of the kits listed in the descriptions and do a little case study. It's worth the effort!

You Only Need These Drumkits 2023 | TOP DRUM KITS IN 2023

I selected this channel to find what the AVERAGE producer is thinking, not someone who may or may not be receiving giveaways for product endorsements or for whom budget is of no concern!

I also circled back to BWB on drumify -- note kits and similar artists.

Discussion time. I kinda hate drumify; it's overpriced, appears closed, and licensing is DUMB. But the kits are worth looking at to see what influential and upcoming producers are doing, the kind of presentation people think is professional.

Note before you think about buying anything, according to licensing, melody loops on drumify are NOT NECESSARILY royalty free. This is kind of an f-u to the customer. If I'm buying, it should damn well be royalty free to use, and cheaper if not. You might as well sell me an album otherwise -- don't be like this when selling your stuff, or don't make these terms fine print.

Still, BWB has some of the highest quality kits I've seen and the largest variety. This is who producers are looking up to and whose content they crave. He's also nice and familiar to folks listening to the radio.

In short, when you see stores like these, stop and take a look around. Take notes. Sites like this are good for getting ideas of how to pitch and pack your samples, titles and vibes -- and how to structure your website or store!

Discussion of paid kits for your references

Great market research for hiphop sample packs. As we know hiphop is full of sample recycling and loudness maximizing samples. Here are some of the must haves worth looking into, and what people think of them.

And that wraps up this giant article!

If you read this far, thank you so much! I hope you found something that you've never heard before, whether it was a plugin, FX, or a write-up, and I especially hope if you copped any of my sample projects that you enjoy them for a long time. I'm always looking for feedback, whether it be on the format of these articles themselves or the content served up, and I'm open for requests!

Big special thanks to my supporters this month for all you've done. @MATRVG @MariogD @CyberDevil @JimmytheCaterpillar, in case I don't get a hold of you before the 14th, happy Valentine's day, or single awareness day as it may be! Love you!

Ciao!