New Software Review: Mike Casey’s Sounds of Surprise by Splice Sounds
Along with a robust collection of one-shots, Mike Casey’s Sounds of Surprise features a wealth of unique riffs, loops, and improvisational nuances.
Finding solid packaged horn sounds has consistently been a challenge for studio composers that want authenticity. I recall growing up in the DX7 days, when you took what you could get—chumpy, blatty patches that were not fooling anyone.
Fortunately, sound libraries have evolved, and there are now two roads to take to get quality horns without hiring session players: programming virtual instruments, or using pre-recorded loops. If you’re interested in the latter, Splice Sounds has just released Mike Casey’s Sounds of Surprise, a library of saxophone loops and one-shots, to their subscribers.
For the uninitiated, Splice Sounds is an offshoot of Splice, the cloud-based music creation and collaboration platform launched in 2014. A subscription service, Splice Sounds offers consumers access to over a million royalty-free samples for a monthly fee. Depending on their needs, you can spend $8 and $30 monthly to download between 100 and 1,000 sounds. These range from loops created by chart-topping producers like KSHMR and dwilly, to single-key classic synth drones from the Stranger Things soundtrack.
Sounds of Surprise for Splice Sounds was conceived, designed, and performed by New York saxophone virtuoso and crossover jazz artist Mike Casey. Since releasing his debut album in February 2017, Mike has broken new ground for a self-releasing jazz artist by chalking up over a million streams without any major label representation. His music has been described by the press as ”giving hope to the future of music” and “demanding of attention with it’s searing, powerful, and eclectic sound”.
The name Sounds of Surprise not only ties in with Casey’s 2017 debut release, but is an homage to an often-used description of jazz improvisation. Much of that extemporized spark has been captured in this library.
Features
Sounds of Surprise contains 218 samples of alto and tenor saxophone notes, noises, and riffs. They’re primarily divided up into loops and one-shots, and further sub-categorized by BPM and key—as well as smaller, more enjoyable classifications such as “growl”.
The loops range in style from uptempo strut to melancholy laze, touching on a myriad of feels in between. Two of my favorites from this category were Alto Saxophone Loop Layback—a wistful lick based around a D6 chord, and Tenor Saxophone Loop Chromatic Minor—a groove so slick that it only needs a beat and bass line to take it from a hook to a jam.
Most of the one-shot sounds are traditional solo hits, but some are more complicated riffs with their own style and presence. You could easily use the Tenor Saxophone One Shot Diminished Riff as the starting point for an acid jazz piece, or one of the many gritty held notes to accentuate the transition into a big chorus.
There are also a number of auxiliary sounds, performed by using what are described by Casey as “extended techniques”. These involve playing the instrument in an atypical fashion to generate unusual tones and glitchy reverberations. There’s a lot of character to be found in this portion of the pack. For example, Alto Saxophone Aux 19 sounds like you caught the horn doing something bad, and it’s trying desperately to explain itself. To me, that John Zorn style of innovatory performance is a ton of fun to play with, although its practical applications in the world of mainstream composition may be limited.
Along with the downloaded pack, Mike extends a personal offer to create custom samples to suit, in case your needs extend beyond what’s included.
In Use
Using the Sounds of Surprise catalog is as simple as downloading the sounds from the Splice platform and importing them into your DAW of choice. Depending on your subscription level and number of available credits, you have the option to download the entire pack at once, or choose the samples individually.
I started writing a new piece immediately by importing a few loops with matching tempos into a session and experimenting from there. As a second step, I tried bringing in some of the more eccentric noises and dropping them into existing pieces to use as sonic textures. The more features you have available for sonic adjustment within your DAW (such as time and pitch manipulation), the further you can go on this path.
There are a number of filters that helped me match the samples up with what I needed from them. While the BPMs and various feel categories (low, soft, growl) were fairly straightforward, I found the ”key” labels could be stretched to some extent. A loop categorized as C minor, for example, could be worked in over an E flat major piece, or even possibly F major, or G natural minor. Depending on your knowledge of theory and comfortability with experimentation, it might be best to use these markers as a rough starting point.
Below is a track I made utilizing the sounds from the sample pack. It was created with my writing partner and regular SonicScoop contributor Rich Crescenti. For a full resolution download of the audio file, click here.
To Be Critical
It doesn’t seem like too much time was invested in the filtering and categorization processes. In one instance specifically, I found the vocabulary misleading. I understood “one-shots” to be a single note or strike, but here, a portion of that category is made up of multi-note patterns I would definitely classify as loops. Major and minor distinctions weren’t available, nor specific key categories when using the Splice Sounds drop-down filters.
These would be larger issues if there were thousands of samples, but with this volume, simply going through the catalog top to bottom doesn’t take too much time.
Further, a few of the loops had an extra 1/4 second of space at the end of them, making it necessary to trim them to the bar, even when the tempo matched up perfectly with the project. While it’s an easy fix, today’s drag-and-drop tech world has set the expectations for details like this fairly high.
Summing it Up
Many horn libraries available in these types of platforms are somewhat genre-generic. They’re bright and brassy, which is great for dubstep, tropical house, and your garden variety pop tracks, but lack any real emotional charge. The Sounds of Surprise patches are unique in their composition and sound, and have a little more gravity around them. Even when contrasted to the many other horn samples available within the Splice platform, these sounds are tangibly moodier and more nuanced. If you’re looking for something along these lines, you should definitely check out Mike Casey’s Sounds of Surprise.
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