Aspen GM Rompler

Eventually we might get a whole GM Rompler with many of the instruments. For the moment here is a collection of instruments covering the first 3 categories Piano, Chromatic Percussion and Organs with 24 instruments total. Many new instruments and lite versions of things like the Salamander Piano. Lots of cool instruments from Sam Gossner's new VCSL project.


Aspen GM Soundset       Win 64   Win 32     Mac AU   MacVST


Note that Reaper and some other DAWs don't like Maize Romplers

See read me for individual instrument licenses, all can be used to make commercial music.

VCSL Instruments

Sam Gossner, the man behind Versillian Studios and the VSCO2 Orchestra, has created the Versilian Community Sample Library. It is really just starting, but there are already lots of fun samples. These samples and my instruments are CC0 which means you can use them for anything you like.

As always I'm using the acronym VCSL so that folks will know where the samples came from, these instruments are my own fault and Sam did all the amazing sampling work. I'm not affiliated with Versillian. I just love the free samples!

JH Piano                    Win 64   Win 32     Mac AU   Mac VST

K Piano                     Win 64   Win 32     Mac AU   Mac VST  

4 Recorder Pack         Win 64   Win 32     Mac VST   Mac AU

Saxello                       Win 64   Win 32     Mac VST   Mac AU

Small Ocarina            Win 64   Win 32     Mac VST   Mac AU


Samples CC0: Sam Gossner and Versillian Studios
Instruments CC0: bigcat instruments
As per usual you are agreeing to terms and conditions.


Here is a bonus instrument. Mattias Westlund of SSO fame created this violin trio using the violin samples from VSCO2, MSLP, ldk1609 and MIS.

Westlund 3 Violins        Win 64   Win 32     Mac VST   Mac AU

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: Mattias Westlund

Christian Henson Pleyel Piano VST

Christian Henson gave away a free set of samples / EXS & Kontakt instruments. I asked on thread if I could make Maize sampler versions and he responded "Oh I sooo want to see this! Please could you post here." So here is a link to the Youtube thread. You can find the instruments under my post as Joe Stevens. Pick the one for your OS.

Christian Henson Youtube

Since the response stopped short of complete permission, I don't feel comfortable posting it on the blog and don't want to get in wrong with one of the biggest sampling companies in our world, but it is easy enough to grab from the Youtube thread.

The piano itself is very odd. I did a lot of tuning, cutting and editing to get a somewhat in tune and consistent feel across the keyboard. It isn't for every situation, but it might be useful as a very different feel than a regular piano. It also comes with a pads VST.

NST Instruments

Magenta is a Google Brain project that has created something called NSynth which seems to be extracting the audio DNA from samples and then mixing it all together in a user controllable synth. While I can't give you the synth (it is highly confusing) which will hopefully someday come out as a VST, I can apparently use the NSynth Dataset to create more traditional though possibly funky sounding instruments.  I've finally added in a Reverb to the GUI as well and thanks to my friend at VST4Free for the background image.
These use the latest version of Maize Sampler and should be compatible with both VST 2 & 3. They also use the new ADSR controls from Maize and should work better.

NST Vocals       Win 64   Win 32     Mac VST   Mac AU

These are 30 acoustic choral 'patches' in 5 instruments. The are arranged by range, Full, High, Mid and Low.

NST Pianos       Win 64   Win 32     Mac VST   Mac AU

These are 5 Acoustic Keyboards which are pianolike at any rate. They are called up from a single instrument sort of like a mini-romper.

License: The dataset is made available by Google Inc. under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Paper: Jesse Engel, Cinjon Resnick, Adam Roberts, Sander Dieleman, Douglas Eck, Karen Simonyan, and Mohammad Norouzi. "Neural Audio Synthesis of Musical Notes with WaveNet Autoencoders." 2017.

Sample Science Player is out

I'm gonna break from my practice of using this blog to post only my own stuff because I wanted to mention that the endlessly cool Sample Science has issued the Sample Science Player.
It is totally free though you can slip him a couple of bucks if you like.

Sample Science Player

Lots of Soundcloud Demos.

Note I had nothing to do with this, I just think its really cool.