Rekkerd has released WolfPack, a free sample pack crafted by SampleScience. The pack contains a collection of sounds that were sampled from the Rhythm Wolf, Timbre Wolf, and Tom Cat hardware instruments by AKAI.
Rhythm Wolf, Timbre Wolf, and Tom Cat haven’t received the warmest of welcomes from the target audience, especially considering that they are relatively affordable analog synthesizers. I can’t help but wonder if AKAI’s analog trio is truly as dissapointing as some users described them, or if the backlash was caused by the company’s, perhaps somewhat misguiding, marketing approach. Despite not having the chance to use one myself yet, I always thought that AKAI’s analog boxes looked kind of promising, even while watching some of the less positive video reviews and demos.
Either way, the three synths were definitely good enough for SampleScience who used them to create a pretty neat free sample pack. WolfPack contains 97 sounds in total, including 41 drum loops, 24 synth loops, 9 one-shot synth samples, and two complete Rhythm Wolf drum kits. The samples are completely royalty-free and are available for direct free download from Rekkerd, no registration or signup required.
At some point, after downloading hundreds upon hundreds of plugins and testing a number of hardware instruments, I started to appreciate the positive creative impact of having a smaller set of music making tools at my disposal. For example, I think that I would, in a way, prefer making a track with AKAI’s analog trio as opposed to making the same track in a studio with dozens of different instruments. Having a wider variety of options is nice, but being limited to a smaller set of tools forces you to get the best out of them. The short WolfPack demo track embedded above shows what SampleScience was able to do with just the Rhythm Wolf, Timbre Wolf, and Tom Cat.
WolfPack is available for free download via Rekkerd (65.6 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 97 audio samples in 24-bit WAV format).
3 Comments
Ronnie
onThanks for sharing, Tomislav!
I agree that using a limited amount of music making tools can be hugely inspiring, or rather, having a whole lot of options can stifle creativity.
Tomislav Zlatic
onDefinitely, took me a while to realise that. :)
Björn Lundberg
onI’ve always liked the akai animal series (is that what they’re called..??). Maybe it’s because i like underdogs and people were very dismissive of them at first and many still are. But it’s also because i know what it’s like to have a limited set of tools and use it and compensate with a lot of creativity to get where you want. EQ, compression, layering a kick with a rim and a conga just to get the right sound.
The Tom Cat i would probably try to adjust the kick’s envelope a bit to get it more “MAN WITH NO NAME” if it’s possible. But that was a big part of the selling point of them. Add outputs and mess about!