In a twist that might seem counterproductive to building a unique artist sound, Deadmau5 and his longtime studio partner Steve Duda have put together a CD-ROM packed full of 100% royalty-free samples for music producers to use in their own tracks.
Some would say it’s a charitable gesture, considering the burgeoning international profile of Deadmau5 and the influential releases of their BSOD project.
If you asked aspiring producers worldwide to name the top 5 producers they most want to sound like for instance, you can bet Deadmau5 would be in there.
But Steve Duda explained that the basis of their Xfer Records sample CD stemmed from the fact that there was a lack of “legal royalty-free sources for producers to use”.
“There’s a ton of sample CDs out there, but most of them are illegal,” explained Duda. “There are a lot of ones I’ve seen other producers using which have lifted samples directly from popular tracks, like from the Beatport Top 10, or from old breaks.”
Their sample CD contains 336 loops at 128 beats per minute, plus a ton of one shot drum hits and percussion sounds that were recorded using an extensive amount of gear including circuit-bent and analogue drum machines, and from vintage synths like Moog and Arp.
Duda also had a plethora of material from recording acoustic drums in various studios.
The process of recording a one hit sounds a bit grueling.
“I tend to use a recording of an acoustic drum as a starting point for kicks and snares, and layer them into some drum machine or add synthetic sounds like sub sweeps or filtered noise,” he said.
“We don’t do a whole lot besides sculpting the dynamics/tail of the sound as we’ve intentionally left the samples fairly raw and unprocessed which makes for greater flexibility getting it to fit in a mix.
“I’ve been collecting sample CDs for 10 years or so; Joel is about the same, so this was an exciting project in the sense of making a ton of stuff completely from scratch, raiding various gear laying around and creating sounds from scratch in software. I even got out some of my own DSPs for generating tones.”
Now the question that many producers will want to know is, how many of the loops and hits on the CD appeared on Deadmau5’ hits?
Deadmau5 told Beatportal, “We stayed away from dipping into stuff we’ve already produced as it has been done, however ‘Ghosts N Stuff’, ‘Bot’ and ‘Word Problems’ made great use of this CD as those tracks were written as we worked on the library.
“You know, I was auditioning some of the stuff we did and I just couldn’t turn away from playing with ‘em and eventually developing tracks of my own from the content.
“But I’m well satisfied that the content is varied enough that you couldn’t really nail the exact same track twice.”
Deadmau5 Xfer Sample CD is priced at $99 and is available from:

https://killthe8.com/merch/pages/7598