Hotel Room Prepared Piano by John Cage.
Puremagnetik has released Amplified Cactus and Hotel Room Prepared Piano, two free Ableton Live instrument racks inspired by the work of John Cage.
John Cage was one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. Being the leader of the post-war avant-garde, his most famous music piece is his 1952 composition 4′33″, during which the musicians don’t play a single note. The idea is that everything we do in life is music.
Drawing inspiration from this, the team at Puremagnetik has created two freebie Ableton Live instrument racks. Both instruments are sample based and developed for use with Ableton Live 9.1.0. They are available for direct download from the Puremagnetik website, user registration is not required.
The good news is that both packs also include individual samples in WAV format. This means that you can use these sounds even if you don’t own Live, in virtually any sampler out there. If you’re looking for a freeware sampler, here’s our list of free sampler VST plugins.
Puremagnetik’s free Amplified Cactus Pack includes a drum rack of “plucked”, percussive articulations and a multisampled rack of “scraped” sounds. Rocks, grass, paper and feathers are among the exciters used to create these sound varieties.
Amplified Cactus is available for free download via Puremagnetik (14.8 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 instrument in ALP format, 51 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format).
Whilst abroad in Israel, Puremagnetik sound developer Micah Frank found his hotel room equipped with a vintage upright piano. After a few attempts to create a conventional upright piano recording, the plan was aborted due to outside noise. Instead, Micah jammed paperclips, seashells, twigs and pieces of plastic into the piano strings and recorded two octaves of prepared piano tones and noises.
Hotel Room Prepared Piano is available for free download via Puremagnetik (55.7 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 instrument in ALP format for Ableton Live, 36 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format).
Audio Demo
Check out the Amplified Cactus audio demo:
