Free Sample Shootout #1: Circuit Bends And Glitches

The Free Sample Shootout begins! To start things of with a big bang, here are more than a dozen free sample packs full of weird sounds that come from circuit bent toys, drum machines, synths, and old organs. Enjoy!

• TR-66 Abuse by synthgeek – This guy’s website is a true little treasure island. Many tasty samples and plugins he made are available for download, among which are these great samples of a messed up Roland TR-66.
• Yamaha Pss-7 Mystery Bend by Brian Green – One of my personal favorites. Not many samples in this pack, but they all sound very organic and interesting.
• TR-66 DeComposer by rhythminmind.net – Another well documented pack containing samples of a circuit bent Roland TR-505. A true gem.
• James’ Circuit Bent Library 1 by Illuminated Sounds – One Speak&Spell, one toy car, one toy drum machine, one Musini… one great sample pack.
• James’ Circuit Bent Library 2 by Illuminated Sounds – Another weird toy, another great sample pack.
• Glitched Out Farfisa Professional 1 by Illuminated Sounds – One’s trash is another man’s treasure. This guy was fixing his friend’s Farfisa, but it sounded so cool while it was broken that he had to sample it. Many thanks to him, as I love how it sounds!
• Casio CA-100 Sound Library by Illuminated Sounds – This one was hard to find, becaused it’s not cathegorized under ‘samples’ at the Illuminated Sounds website, but I was very happy once I got it. Awesome glitchy samples inside.
• Circuit Bending a Casio by Sam Greene – Very mellow sounding bends. A nice couple of weird sounds can be found inside this pack.
• Circuit Bent Roland Dr-550 by Roil Nose – More glitched out drum machines! I can never have enough of these, to be honest. Since these are hosted on freesound.org, you can preview each individual hit before downloading it or the whole soundpack.
• Glitch drumkit 1&2 by cyberworm – Even though he works for Prime Loops now, his website is still filled with huge amounts of great sounding freebies. Guy’s a legend.
• 107 Free Glitch/Lo-Fi percussion hits by Dan303 – A fairly big pack with messed up sounds coming from various software and hardware synthesizers.
• Various sample packs by Blips – There are more than 20 packs on this website, and they’re all filled out with interesting sounds. I suggest you get them all and keep the ones that work best for you. Hint: if you’re into experimental music, check out the tune on the Blips page. I pressed play and forgot all about it because my internet was lagging. But the page remained open in its tab as I continued browsing and the tune suddenly started playing. At first I thought my speakers were going nuts or that my soundcard is dying. But i turned the speakers up because it sounded spectacular and a minute later I realised – it’s the Blips tune, damnit!
• 50 Glitchtastic free Glitch Hop samples by Boyinaband – These samples are  inspired by glitch hop beats but they can obviously be used as a spice in various other styles. Great for layering.
• Free Glitches Vol.01 by Bronto Scorpio – Very aggressive sounding samples. I don’t really like these to be honest, but people who are into industrial will probably find them quite good.
• Free IDM/Glitch/Minimal drum samples by skald – From a year 2007 post on IDM forums, these samples are still alive and they still sound very interesting. Hint: more samples on page 12. ;]
• Circuitbent Speak N Spell by Rozzer.net – A lovely collection of glitchy Speak N Spell sounds.
• Electronic Critters DEMO by Haunted House Records – A free taster sample pack from a much larger sample library. I was never really impressed by these as they’re too processed and clean sounding for my taste. But they got some great marks from magazines like Computer Music, so who am I to judge. :]
• HAPTIC Series by H/PTIC AUDIO – More weird and noisy than circuit bent and glitchy, these sample packs will provide a touch of eery atmosphere for your audio works.
• meat for glitch by [email protected] – Noises from a DIY filterbank. 72Mb of WAV files inside the pack.
• Odyssey FX by Wave Alchemy – Weird noises and glitches made with the lovely ARP Odyssey and recorded with care by the guys at Wave Alchemy. You need to register in order to get the full download.
• Free Glitches by laptopnoise.com – Some wild sounds on this page, even though they are in mp3 format. But who cares about compression artefacts in a sound made of glitch artefacts?

That’s it for now, enjoy the samples, comment, subscribe and tune in next week for more freebies! These articles will be updated whenever I find more interesting free samples on the net, so you might want to check back from time to time.

Previous Free Sample Shootouts: click here
bpb Samples: cick here