Enjoy all new sounds for Airwave, designed by Sam Gutman

Want to know more about how these new presets came to be? We caught up with Sam Gutman to pick his brain about the process of making the new Airwave sounds, his sources of inspiration, and his hopes for the sounds when they find their way to other musicians’ hands.

What was your initial inspiration behind creating these patches for Airwave?

“The first patch I made was Barry’s Air Harmony, which is a very strange patch. It’s a chord patch, which means that when you hit one key, a whole chord plays. In this case, it alternates between inversions of a major 6th chord and diminished 7th chords, coming from Barry Harris’s approach to jazz harmony. The inspiration was two-fold. First was the idea that maybe, just maybe, chord patches could actually be cool! They are generally found in tacky accompaniment modes on beginner keyboards, and I wanted to challenge myself to make an interesting and practical version of something that is usually pretty lame. 

Secondly, this patch was inspired by hip-hop sampling. When I played the song “Final Hour” live with Lauryn Hill, I would sometimes trigger and manipulate samples of the harp part from the original recording. I wanted to make a patch around that idea, but with chords recorded specifically to be triggered on a keyboard. Barry’s Air Harmony is made of sine waves, but that was originally just supposed to be proof-of-concept. My end goal was to record a guitar or a harp playing these chords and build the patch from those samples. I’m definitely still going to do that at some point.” 

You went into a lot of great detail about the theory behind how you created the chord patch Barry’s Air Harmony, mentioning that “limitations are opportunities to do cool new things”. Did this line of thinking come up again in any of the other patches you created for this pack?

‘It actually came up again with EVERY patch when, for a period of time, I accidentally lost the ability to edit sounds in Airwave Player. Basically, I updated Airwave Player and accidentally kicked myself off the “developer” version I was using to create the sounds. At first, I was incredibly frustrated because I was forced to work in Equator2, which does not have the Air Dimensions. But it ended up being one of the best things that happened because it forced me to focus only on the fundamentals of sound design for two weeks… dialing in things like how the envelopes responded to strike velocity and perfecting key tracking. At the end of the day, it’s those kinds of fundamentals that make a patch feel alive. Limitations definitely breed creativity.’

With this soundpack, not only were you creating patches for the dimensions available on Seaboard, but you had to factor in the added dimensions of expression that Airwave introduces. What was the experience like creating patches that would work simultaneously with two different instruments?

‘It was very demanding but incredibly rewarding. Between the five dimensions of touch on the Seaboard, the six dimensions of Air with the Airwave, AND the Seaboard’s five macros…a lot of things have to be packed into every patch. Each of those parameters has to bring something meaningful, and it all has to combine into a cohesive whole. I had to keep a Google spreadsheet just to keep it all straight! But the result is a set of patches that I feel more proud of than any other sound design that I’ve done.’