Free Ghosthack Dubstep Snares + Interview + Pro Pack Giveaway

German dubstep producer Ghosthack has recently released Dubstep Production Library, a commercial dubstep sound pack (priced at €10) featuring 600 high quality royalty free samples and loops, along with a free collection of 15 dubstep snare samples. He is joining us for a fun little interview about his sound design techniques and is also kindly giving away one free copy of his commercial sound pack to one lucky BPB reader!

The freebie snare collection called Ghosthack Dubstep Snares contains 15 royalty free dubstep snare samples in 24-bit WAV format. The Ghosthack Dubstep Snares pack is available for direct free download from Ghosthack’s website (you won’t be asked to register for a user account or anything like that).

The commercial Dubstep Production Library pack is priced at €10 and it contains 600 dubstep samples and loops in total, adding up to 481 MB of royalty free audio material. The pack features a collection of great sounding drum one shots, basslines, percussive loops, NI Massive presets and various other dubstep sounds. If you’re a fan of Ghosthack’s earlier freebie releases (all of which are still available for free download on the Dubstep Production Library page linked above), or if you’re simply looking for a high quality collection of dubstep sounds, you should definitely check out this commercial pack, especially since the price is such a bargain.

We talked to Ghosthack about his sound design techniques and his plans for the future. You can read the full-length interview below and scroll all the way down the page to enter the giveaway for a chance to win a free copy of the Dubstep Production Library sound pack.

The Interview

BPB: Hi Chris, thanks for joining us for this interview! Your work has been featured on BPB numerous times in the past (ever since your first dubstep sample pack) and it’s a real pleasure for us to finally get a chance to have a little chat with you. :)

Ghostack: Hey, thank you too for this interview invitation and for featuring my work since 2010 on BPB!

BPB: How did you first get into sound design? Was it simply a by-product of being an electronic musician, or was sound design one of your passions right from the start? Many sound designers actually make their first steps by crafting new sounds and patches for their tunes from scratch. Was this the case with you?

Ghostack: Yeah it was actually more of a by-product of being an electronic musician, but sound design is always a big part in electronic music except if you use only unedited samples and loops.

I started making electronic music in 2006 and a few years later I started recording my own samples because you have a better workflow with prerecorded samples instead of creating every sound from scratch right in the production process. Then I decided to release my first sample pack with 100 samples in 2010 and it gained a lot of interest and downloads, actually quite more downloads than my free music. This first dubstep sample pack has over 160.000 downloads for now.

So that was my motivation to learn even more about sound design and to release the next sample packs in the coming years.

BPB: What is your single most favorite tool for sound design? A synthesizer, a sampler, or perhaps an awesome reverb plugin? Also, which digital audio workstation and wave editor do you use as the main platform for sound design?

Ghostack: I use FL Studio as the DAW since version 5. It’s definitely my DAW of choice and I can’t imagine to change this in the years to come. As a wave editor, I use Adobe Audition at the moment.

My favorite tool for sound design is Native Instruments Massive in combination with some custom effect plugins. It’s a very flexible and dynamic synthesizer and I use it for basslines, pads and lead sounds. Especially in combination with NI’s Guitar Rig, you can create some interesting sounds that way.

I bought Komplete 9 a few months ago from Native Instruments. I could really recommend this, since the pack is full of some other great plugins beside Massive, for example Razor and their Monark synth. I also really like their reverb plugins, RC24 and RX48. The best plugin for delays is MFM2 by the way ;)

BPB: Is there a specific music genre which inspires you the most in terms of sound design?

Ghostack: That’s hard to say, because I listen to a pretty wide range of (electronic) music. I really like dubstep, drum and bass, IDM, glitch, trip hop and ambient, but also house, minimal and techno stuff, even classical and oriental music. I think they all have a specific influence on my music and my sound design.

BPB: Are there any sound design tricks that you’d like to share with us? Do you have some favorite sound design technique which you use time and time again when creating new sounds?

Ghostack: I read about a pretty nice small mastering trick these days in a Facebook producer group. They talked about a free plugin called TP Basslane. You could center your low frequencies with this plugin, so that your bassline or low frequency kick sounds have a mono instead of a stereo sound, which results in a much clearer bass sound in your whole mix. I use this in my current projects and I will use it in forthcoming projects as well.

In my earlier works, I used the dBlue Glitch plugin on different things in nearly every track, mostly on drums and percussion, but also on pads, vocals, leads or sometimes basslines. It’s one of the best available glitch plugins and the best thing about it is that it’s free. This plugin has nine unique glitch effects with different parameters, panning and filtering options.

I also like to separate the mid and high frequencies from a bassline into separate effect channels. So, when I create a bassline in NI Massive and decide that the general sound is finished, I will copy the Massive instance and route it to another effect channel in FL Studio to control the mid and high frequency sounds. I think that this results in a much clearer and better sound for basslines, especially in dubstep and drum and bass productions.

Layering is also a big part of my sound creation process, my snares always consist of different sounds playing at the same time, combined with some nice effect plugins. Also, a separation of a dry and a wet reverb snare to two different mixing channels can result in some interesting results.

BPB: You’ve recently published an interesting video tutorial on YouTube, showing off some of your techniques for creating bass sounds. Can we expect to see more stuff like this from you in the future?

Ghostack: Yeah, I plan to do even more video tutorials in the future, it’s just a matter of time. :) I thought about a tutorial which will showcase making a dubstep tune only with resources from my sample packs for example.

BPB: Sounds like a great idea, we’d love to see that one in the future! Finally, thanks so much for giving away a copy of your commercial dubstep sound pack to BPB readers! Do you have any future plans for commercial releases?

Ghostack: Yeah of course, I work on some tracks for an ep release in April on Sub:lvl Audio in the moment, but after this release I will focus on publishing another commercial sound pack as well as a free one. I think that a sample pack about a specific type of sound would be interesting, something like “100 Atmospheric Pad Sounds” or “100 Neuro Bassline Samples” or anything like this. :)

Or another genre-specific sound library would be cool, maybe for Deep House or Drum and Bass for example.

The Giveaway

Ghosthack is kindly giving away one free copy of his amazing Dubstep Production Library (worth $10) to one lucky BPB reader. To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment in the comments section below.

The winner will be picked using a random number draw and announced on this page on Friday, March 27th. Please don’t leave multiple comments, as only one entry per person is allowed. We will contact the winner via email, so please also double-check your entry for typos before posting your comment.

Good luck everyone and thanks for reading BPB! :)

The giveaway is now closed. Our lucky winner this time around is John (comment #14)! Congrats! :)

Thanks everyone for joining in and stay tuned for more giveaways next week!