Capturing that human dynamic
Borsta – your new virtual percussionist
Brushed percussion is cool. What is tricky to emulate though, is that essential warm human vibe that’s core to a brushed beat. One can of course sample a beat played by a live drummer and loop it, but we wanted to be able to tweak the parameters and have something with a true sense of dynamic response. So we started thinking and finally came to a solution that we feel is very cool indeed.
We came up with a way to design an audio engine that allows for continuous changes in brush intensity, resulting in very natural sounding brushing phrases and rhythms. Two parallel sequencers, one for events and one for envelopes, let you get into the nitty gritty and fine-tune sound and rhythmic elements in rather minute detail. In effect allowing you to design exactly how you want your virtual percussionist to play.
Not to say that any of this was easy. It was actually in the works for over a year. In addition to all that heavy thinking, iterating, designing and developing, we had to do a lot of sampling. A fair bit over 7000 samples in fact. This rather huge cluster of sounds is the basis for the 18 different instruments we finally decided to include in the release candidate of Borsta. That’s over 400 layered samples per instrument, and it’s the unique way the audio engine makes use of these layers that give Borsta its life-like sound and lets the user arrange changes in intensity and speed. Together with one-shots, delay, shuffle, randomization, velocity curves, room, reverb, EQ and more, we feel Borsta gives you a rather huge amount of hands on control. All of which will let any cat make a brushed beat that feels totally effortless, in the pocket and cool as you like.
Take a listen to the sound examples!