Maxwel Samples Vol. 1
Analog Synths & Drums / Westcoast Synthsphere
70 multisampled instruments and drum kits from analog synthesizers and drum machines, plus 28 West Coast synthesis loops — 544 samples in all common formats: Ableton Live, SoundFont 2, SFZ, MPC, Teenage Engineering OP-XY, and WAV.
The instruments in this collection trace a lineage of sound design spanning five decades. Their originals — the Oberheim OB-Xa, the Moog Minimoog Model D, the Roland TR-808, the Roland TR-909, the Roland TB-303, the Linn LM-1/LinnDrum, the Sequential Prophet-600, and the Korg MS-20 — defined genres, launched movements, and became cultural artifacts. For most of their existence, they were accessible only through well-funded studios or the second-hand market at prices reaching tens of thousands of dollars.
Behringer’s recreations have drawn both criticism and praise. What is worth acknowledging: a generation of musicians now has access to sounds that were previously locked behind prohibitive second-hand markets. A bedroom producer in Lagos, a student in Osaka, an independent artist in Berlin — all can now work with the same tonal palette that once required a six-figure equipment budget.
Every analog instrument was recorded through an Arturia AudioFuse 16Rig — a 24-bit/192kHz interface with 118 dB dynamic range on its AD converters, ensuring that the full depth and nuance of each analog signal was captured without compromise. The instruments were carefully multisampled and mapped — so these sounds can travel into any DAW, any sampler, any creative environment. A smartphone, a tablet, a secondhand laptop — anything that can load a SoundFont or an SFZ file becomes a vessel for half a century of analog synthesis. The hardware can stay in the studio, break down, or never be acquired in the first place. The sounds endure.
Analog circuits are inherently imprecise — oscillators drift out of tune, filters respond with subtle nonlinearities, no two notes are ever identical. These imperfections are the reason a single Minimoog note feels alive in a way that a mathematically perfect sawtooth wave does not. Multisampling captures them as they are: real voltages, with all their warmth and imperfection intact.
Madrona Labs Aalto complements the hardware with a different synthesis philosophy. Where the Behringer instruments follow the East Coast tradition — subtractive filters, the paradigm established by Robert Moog — Aalto draws from the West Coast school pioneered by Don Buchla: waveshaping, modulation, and complex envelopes. Sounds that evolve and breathe rather than being carved from a static waveform.
The complete sample pack is available on Gumroad — including presets for Ableton Live, SoundFont 2, SFZ, MPC, Teenage Engineering OP-XY, and 544 raw WAV files. On Bandcamp, the samples are available as merged tracks: drum kits, basses, and instruments as continuous audio files, alongside 27 Westcoast Synthsphere loops.