Mosca Tampoco Pack Vol.1

I remember reading a review, or maybe an obituary, of the iconic producer SOPHIE a few years back. What I should really say is I don’t remember reading it - but some stuff stuck with me that might or might not have been in the piece. The actual writing wasn’t too important, or even SOPHIE’s music (sorry, not a big fan) - but I now have a very strong, almost visual concept of a certain type of music - super elastic, full of motion, where elements morph fluidly from one to the next - like how squealing, almost ultrasonic feedback can suddenly dip down the spectrum into the infrasonic realms in less than half a second…

The other thing I may or may not remember is how stupid and lazy it is to still be relying on terms like snare drum / shaker / 808 bass etc. I guess I understand why we still do it, but this concept of sounds that live somewhere in between these simple terms like synth or clap really interested me, and got me thinking about how we imagine music, and the limits we put on ourselves, usually unconsciously.

I wanted to explore sounds that were neither a rimshot or a 303 synth stab, but something in between that could do the job of both. Neither a stubbed-toe-shout or a modem. Neither a prepared piano note or a Blawan modular kick. Neither a car alarm or an amplified cuttlefish synapse. U get the gist hopefully (and the name of the pack, 'Tampoco’ translates as ‘neither’ in Spanish), and now this whole sound world has opened up.

So here u have a tonne of these in-between sounds, sometimes melodic enough to build a tune out of, sometimes combining frequencies from all across the spectrum, sometimes a tiny sliver of noise or a long transition, sometimes just a layer to add spice to say, a clap (I’m not saying we can’t use kicks or claps anymore...)

I deliberately avoided labelling elements ‘riser’ or ‘snare’ or 'foley' or whatever - everything is simply ‘oneshot' unless it has three or more percussive elements, in which case I’ve labelled it ‘fill’. Some of the oneshots have a natural rhythm to them as well, and I’ve labelled the bpms where possible, even though I’ve kept actual loops to a minimum - but try not to pay too much attention to numbers as groove can (and should) be all over the grid.

I hope this helps with opening up a few minds about the possibilities we have for producing exciting music nowadays - we really can fuck around with traditional structure / hierarchies / grids / methods / patterns / rules etc etc... u know the thing in visual art about drawing upside down or drawing negative space? So say you're copying a photo of a cow - you'd think u know roughly what a cow looks like, but it's a trap because those are preconceived and inaccurate ideas - instead u turn the photo upside down and just focus on the lines themselves, and instead of drawing cow legs, u focus on the negative space *between* the legs for example. We can do that in music too.

Even as I'm writing this now I'm still coming up with ideas of how to fuse sounds together - will have to get working on Vol.2 soon... (talking of which, if u like this pack, check out my Patreon site cos I will put all the samples in my looooong shortlist that didn't quite make it into Tampoco up there in an exclusive bonus pack. Still good samples, just didn't quite fit the exact brief here - patreon.com/deejaymosca )

So what do the sounds actually sound like? Well despite saying I wasn't a big SOPHIE fan, I've fed the spirit of her music - hyperpop or whatever u want to call it - through a Mosca lens, and created weird, wonderful, playful, rubbery, atonal, metallic, wooden, electronic, resonant sounds that all have a quality of movement - whether it's a simple flange or a whole morphing delay tail that turns into a sub bass or a ceramic clonk... think of it this way - u know those AI clips u see nowadays where one image merges eerily but effortlessly into another? Like that, but with sound.

TL;DR - u don't actually need to read the whole concept behind these samples - pick and choose bits u like and chuck em in your tunes like u normally would - I've tried hard to make everything functional first and foremost, those long unusable glitch-messes u sometimes find in sample packs are good for nothing.

Samples are at 44.1Hz sample rate and 24-bit depth. Each one is meticulously level adjusted and I've made sure they all start and finish on 0dB (god it's boring doing that). Hope u enjoy these and as ever, feel free to get in touch if u use them in your productions - interested to hear what we can make out of this >>>