The latest instrument from Excite Audio is made in collaboration with Grammy-winner Mura Masa.
Introducing the latest Bloom instrument from Excite Audio. It serves up supremely high-quality, forward-thinking one-shots and loops in a performance-based interface. Samples can be played in your DAW or sequenced within Bloom, with great performance tools for manipulating audio on the fly.
The sounds themselves are derived from the acclaimed Curve 1 album by Grammy-winning producer Mura Musa. His style flows from late-night Hackney soundclash vibes to collaborations with US rappers like ASAP Rocky and Lil Uzi Vert, as well as remixes for pop superstars like Lady Gaga and Blackpink. So it’s no surprise that the range of sounds here is as impressive as the quality.
In terms of where this all fits into your production process, Bloom Mura Masa really shines in two ways. Firstly, used as an inspirational, track-starting scratchpad. Secondly, when you have an existing project that feels like it’s missing that standout hook or is feeling a bit vanilla and sonically homogenised.
There’s way too much tasty stuff to cover everything here, but let’s start with an introductory tour, then quickly build a brand new track idea using some of our favourite Bloom tricks.
Patches, sound banks and samples, oh my
Opening the plugin in our DAW (it also runs standalone), we see two octaves of piano keys. The 14 whites are mapped to 14 samples per preset, and can be played manually. The red keys (sharps on your MIDI keyboard) are all playback performance keys that you can trigger live or sequence in a MIDI clip.
Pressing any of the first five reds does something cool to the samples playing – half-speed, double-speed, an octave down, an octave up, and reverse. The second five trigger one of five sequences per preset. For example, you could have one for drums, drum plus bass, bass and drums and riff, a breakdown, an edit….you get the picture.
Bloom Mura Masa comes stocked with 112 samples spread across 98 presets, with each preset containing its own combination of 14 samples and five sequences (you can load your own samples and program your own sequences too).
112 doesn’t sound much, but Mura Masa uses every tool in the box to flip them, so the range of presets is varied and exceptionally inventive. Below is an original sample followed by the same sample tweaked in a preset.
[quote align=right text=”Bloom Mura Masa excels as both an inspiring starting point and a remedy for bland projects”]
The lo-fi effect
The front panel dishes up four performance effects controls, too: Terminal (distortion), Peek (ducking), Angle (phased reverb), and Sides (stereo width). And clicking the bottom right icon displays Modulation (chorus, vibrato, or flange), Reverb (plate, hall, or spring), Speaker (hi-fi, cabinet, or device), Lo-Cut, and Hi-Cut. These latter five can even be sequenced.
Retro random fun
There’s a Randomise button too. It switches the currently loaded samples but leaves the setup and sequence settings alone. If you’ve ever used a hardware sampler, you’ll know how cool it sounds when you accidentally play the MIDI files for one song with the sample bank for another. It often delivers bizarre and inspirational stuff that you’d never get any other way.
Below is the original sequence followed by two versions of the same sequence with randomised samples…
All in the edit
We click Edit to manipulate samples and sequence them. From here we can edit sample start and end, basic envelope controls, pitch, playback mode (forwards, forwards-then-back, hold, one shot etc.), playback speed, formant, and even whether or not playback is warp-synced to BPM.
Step by step
Below is the sequence lane for the selected sample. Editing and creating sequences is incredibly simple – just click a square in a lane to add a step, click again to remove one, and drag the end to change the length.
We can also Click Fullscreen to display all 14 lanes at once.
Both views are useful. The full screen’s ideal for composing, as we can see all the parts together. The single-lane view can be better for modulating individual steps.
Which brings us to one of the coolest parts of the sequencer: it lets us add step-specific effects / actions to every step of every lane, independently.
- Trigger controls when a sample plays, and for how long
- Probability defines how likely an event is to happen, which is great for variations and random edits.
- Velocity, Attack, and Release do exactly what you’d expect.
- Pitch lets us play a riff using a single sample.
- Timing allows us to pull individual notes slightly forwards or backwards, which can be great for adding a bit of custom groove or humanisation.
- Perform lets us add one of 21 different actions, from fast rolls, ghost notes, accents, and flams, to rises, falls, and crescendo effects.
Using these effects we can do stuff like sequence a rimshot that has randomly-occurring hits and rolls, like this…
… or some more randomly added / dropped notes, also with rolls, like this…
It’s great for introducing movement and variation to your sequences.
Getting on track
Now let’s find some cool riffs and drum patterns to start a track. For auditioning sequences and loops we create a two-bar MIDI note clip and play it on a loop. We’re using the fifth sequence (played with A#3) as it’s usually the fullest, making it the best way to audition as many samples / elements as possible per preset.
Each time we find a preset we like we duplicate the channel for later editing… and continue browsing.
Here are some of the riffs and beat loops we want to use.
Riffing
We also like this bassline, but we need it to follow the riff… at the moment they clash at the end.
Bloom instruments aren’t really meant for playing one sample up and down the keyboard chromatically, so instead we load the same sample into another lane and tune it up two semitones to match the riff.
We could also sequence the pitch changes, but samples often have tricky harmonics that clash, and this way we can fine-tune the bassline sample lanes separately.
Now they work together!
Going off menu
Bloom also lets us use our own audio and we’ve got an acapella we want to chop up. (NOTE: Bloom’s architecture is designed for performance so can only handle quite short samples… up to about 8 seconds).
We select an INIT patch and drag the sample into the waveform slot for both sequencer lanes 1 and 2.
Then we select a different sample start point for each lane and create a two bar MIDI clip to play sequence A. Next we enter Fullscreen sequencer mode and program a pattern. We also add Probability variations to two hits and a Perform roll to one of those, creating periodic vocal repeats.
We just need an edit variation so we duplicate this channel and program in a choppy little edit as a MIDI clip in our DAW. Why not sequence this stutter edit in Bloom too? Because we’re adding a performance control note too and that’s visually easier when the sequence and performance notes are on the same screen.
Pulling it all together
Now we sequence a rough arrangement of all our MIDI clips in our DAW. We want to separate our Mura Masa sequences into their constituent parts (e.g. drums and music) as this makes it easier to arrange (and mix and process) them. To do that we just duplicate the channels and solo the selected sounds for each in the Bloom sequencer.
Splitting them up isn’t essential, though – sometimes you might think processing a full sequence together, as you would an audio loop, sounds better.
At this stage we can add in some extra performance control notes and tweak some of our MIDI clips and Bloom sequences.
There’s a really nice retro rave vibe to a lot of the content, so we go with a choppy, three-tracks-in-one style UK hardcore arrangement.
There’s no mixdown yet, but the vibe is there, and the whole thing took us less than 90 minutes. Check out the vox and dub versions below.
Have you tried out Bloom Mura Masa yet? We’d love to hear what you come up with using these sounds, so post your own jams below or on our socials.
Find out more about Bloom Mura Masa on Plug in Boutique here.
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