Buddha Machine Refill

I've had these samples laying around for awhile and have enjoyed playing with them in both Ableton Live and Reason, so I figured it was about time I set them up in a refill for others to enjoy (and no, this isn't the secret refill I referred to in an earlier post.) If you aren't familiar with what a Buddha Machine is here's some info:

A number of years ago the Chinese based band FM3 came up with probably the most ingenuous way to market their music in this day and age, the Buddha Machine. Buddhist prayer machines are very prevalent in Asia and why no one else had thought of using this gadget to market music is beyond me. If you've never seen an electronic prayer box they are small handheld items, generally with 5-10 sampled prayers that loop over and over again. I've seen Hindi and Muslim ones as well before on Ebay. But I digress, FM3 has two versions out now of their Buddha Machines and each have 9 samples that can be selected with a switch on the side. The newest version also has a pitch control, which many users had modified on the original unit. These units are a lot of fun, especially if you get a few of them together, playing different samples. FM3 have performed concerts with nothing but their Buddha Machines.

Get your own
buddha box for Reason!

A few notes: The Mod Wheel is set up to control the Attack (farther up the longer), samples are played with the white keys between C2 - D3. I set them up in combinators with both a delay and reverb you can adjust to your liking. The NNXT only has 8 stereo outs, so samples 1 and 2 are both playing on channel 1, the rest of the samples have their own track. I highly recommend opening up the combinators and playing with the panning a bit on the mixer. And don't forget you can always add another device if you want to control the panning, I really love Malstrom for this kind of stuff because of the interesting curves in Mod A & B. Version 2's samples are of a little better quality because they were wavs downloaded directly from FM3, while Version 1 were recorded from the 1/8 output from a Buddha Machine. Enjoy!