Perfect for illustrating distorted talkie walkies (in any language) as well as broken radios, games and toys... talkative droids, vintage SF interfaces — especially glitchy ones.

Glitches, feedbacks, short circuits, dying batteries, leaking capacitors – ground hums and sudden discharges - every cry, scream or whisper a miswired audio circuit can utter was recreated in the (semi) controlled environment of 2496 A.D.'s analog studio, with its big modular synthesizer.

Sound editors will find these sounds super grounded in the physical –electrical– realm, far from any digital synthesis.

Sound designers will also find it a valuable source of raw material and inspiration.

See also: Electronic Mayhem vol. 2

Best of the worst

In essence, a modular synth is the evolutionary link between an electronics lab and a musical instrument. For this library, we ditched the latter aspect entirely, to focus on the former. We patched our synth's hundred modules in every least conventional, most unholy way we could come up with, looking for the best buzzes, bleeps, glitches and screeches we could capture.

A well sorted mess

Every bit of mayhem was recorded in many takes, providing enough raw material for creating long sequences and multiple variations. Pre-sequenced phrases are also provided, in addition to single bursts.

Sound clips are grouped into families and sub-families of tone (There are about 60 such groups). All files are meta-tagged.

Stereo is twice as fun

All signals were fed through a whole battery of analog distortions (both tube- and transistor-based), adding their own particular grit. Those were multichannel recorded and mixed in stereo resulting in big, savagely wide sounds - yet perfectly mono compatible.

High sample rates are your friends

Because, while deeply rooted in the physical world, these sounds are abstract in nature, you can pitch them up or down at your leisure, thus exploring a virtually limitless array of material.

To this end, everything was recorded at 192 KHz (OK, in rare instances, "just" 96KHz) to allow for slowing down up to 4x without any loss of brightness. Extra care was taken to keep all ultrasounds rich, tight and clean, right up to the Nyquist frequency - so they remain just as lush when brought down into the audible spectrum.

A 48KHz version is also available, would you prefer a lighter weight. You can choose your preferred resolution at the download page.