Synth Samples

Every other instrument makes sound by moving air. A synth builds it out of electricity first and moves air only at the speaker. Filters carve frequencies out of the raw waveform, envelopes set how fast it arrives and how long it holds, and one instrument covers a string pad on one record and an unnameable lead on the next.

The Minimoog reached stages in 1970, monophonic and portable, so players used it for bass lines and solos. The Prophet-5 added polyphony and patch memory in 1978, Roland's Juno chorus thickened anything run through it, and the DX7 landed in 1983 with FM bells and electric pianos, synth sounds that turned up on an enormous share of records for the rest of the decade.

Meanwhile, Giorgio Moroder sequenced a Moog bassline through "I Feel Love" in 1977 and handed dance music a pulse that never drifted. Bernie Worrell played Parliament's low end on a Minimoog. Boogie records stacked synth stabs against live bass, Italo and freestyle built entire arrangements out of arpeggios, and house and techno picked up the same machines secondhand once studios sold them off cheap.

The catalog spans single held pads through full sequenced passages. Analog patches with the oscillators drifting a few cents apart, FM presets from the digital years, Moog bass tracked straight to tape, and synth keys samples where the player's timing and velocity ended up in the take alongside the patch. Royalty-free synth loops fill out the other half of the library, cut to a fixed tempo and cleared the moment they hit your drive.

We license these directly with the labels and publishers who own them, including a lot of small catalogs that have never been digitized anywhere else, so the synth samples you download are original recordings and covered by Tracklib’s licensing.