Monday, January 30

Nucleus SoundLab - Celluloid Beats Reason Refill!


Nucleus SoundLab released a brand new refill for Reason 6 today called Celluloid Beats! This refill is part of a newly launched series designed by Jeremy Janzen dubbed Modular Grooves. Now I had the pleasure of working on this project and I'll tell you I've been wanting to spill the beans about this one for months! First off what sets Celluloid Beats apart from other Nucleus SoundLab refills is that, one, it's loop based; and two, these loops have been sampled with a new proprietary sampling technique, called Wide BPM, developed by Jeremy Janzen specifically for the Modular Grooves series. Jeremy goes into more detail about this method in the Demo Video posted below, definitely check it out:





If you watched the above video you no doubt noticed the incredible sound of the loops in Celluloid Beats. These loops were developed using a process Jeremy Janzen describes as an "additive vocoding techique to emphasize long, smooth decay stages." The decay of which is controllable with Rotary 4 on the front of each combinator. Speaking of the combinator, inside is of course a Dr OctoRex Loop Player loaded with that patches specific loop into the eight banks. Why the same loop? Well that's where this gets really cool - slot 1 is the pristine loop, while the loops in the seven other slots have been "remixed" with not only the parameters in Dr OctoRex itself, but with individual slices being sent to different Reason devices for everything from subtle filtering and echoes to stuttering madness! Rotary 1 on the combi controls which loop is playing during each bar. But here's a little trick I learned while developing patches for Celluloid Beats - if you open up the combinator and switch the "Trig Next Loop" (to the right of the Mod Wheel on Dr. OctoRex) from the "Bar" setting to "1/16" and quickly turn Rotary 1 it's instant glitch nirvana! In addition to designing sounds on this project I also wrote the demo mp3, check it out:





The mp3 is made up of six different segments each using a unique combinator from Celluloid Beats with an additional sound source from another Nucleus SoundLab ReFill. Here's the rundown:

00:00 - 00:24 - Bourne Auto combi from Celluloid Beats with Added Harmony combi from the ChordWaves ReFill

00:25 - 00:56 - Ease combi from Celluloid Beats with Spheriboc combi from Pantheon III

00:57 - 01:23 - Mark Two combi with Interstellar Gate combi from Viral Outbreak ReFill

01:24 - 01:45 - Mirrored combi from Celluloid Beats with Picking Daises combi from Pantheon III

01:46 - 02:16 - Dead of Night combi from Celluloid Beats with Bluetube combi from Nanosequences

02:17 - 02:54 - New Paradigm combi from Celluloid Beats with Supertouch Bass combi from Pantheon III




Now that you have an idea of what Celluloid Beats is all about, here's the rundown of what's included with the refill:

- 40 24-bit 44khz REX2 loops form the base of Celluloid Beats
- 280 loop remixes using all 8 loop slots on Dr. OctoRex
- Each patch built exclusively for Reason 6
- All REX2 loops included outside the ReFill, for use in other samplers
- Detailed PDF documentation on the creation and operation of the ReFill

You can purchase Celluloid Beats today for $29 USD from Nucleus-SoundLab.com!

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