WORLDWIND SOUND DIVISION

Chicago, New York, and Detroit house production library

223 MIDI files · 56 synth patches · 8 volumes · 3 kit maps

What this is

Worldwind Sound Division is a curated production library built around the American club music that defined the period from roughly 1979 to 1993 — from the South Side of Chicago to King Street, Newark, and Detroit.

Each volume is a complete working set: drum patterns, basslines, chord progressions, and synth patches that belong together and are programmed to the conventions of that specific scene. Nothing here is a generic preset or a renamed loop. The grooves are built from the way the machines actually behaved, with swing measured in ticks, drum maps decoded pad by pad, and filter and envelope values shaped from hardware behavior rather than guesswork.

The volumes

01 · Chicago Jack - 122 BPM · Trax era. Jacking, relentless, shuffled.

02 · Deep House - 120 BPM · Larry Heard. Chords lead, drums recede.

03 · NY Garage - 118 BPM · Levan. Disco roots, live feel, dub space.

04 · NJ Gospel House - 122 BPM · Humphries. Church harmony, hard floor.

05 · Freestyle & Tribal - 120 BPM · Electro, Latin, and Afro club. Digital.

06 · Acid House - 124 BPM · Phuture. One 303 with the knobs moving.

07 · Detroit Techno - 126 BPM · The Belleville Three. Cold and futurist.

08 · Hip-House & Electro - 120 BPM · The rap-house crossover. Broken kicks.

The swing is baked into the MIDI as tick offsets, so you do not need a groove pool. Quantizing these files to a straight grid removes the single characteristic that makes them sound like the records they came from.

Swing is also applied selectively. The percussion swings while the kick, snare, and clap stay dead on the grid. That contrast is what gives the New York and New Jersey patterns their pull.

Drum mapping

Every drum pattern is supplied three times.

• VinylHouseDrums — C3 upward, with kick 60, clap 61, closed hat 62, open hat 63, snare 64, perc 65/66, cymbal 67.
• TR707 — C1 upward, matching RF-DRUMS and most 707 kits.
• GeneralMIDI — standard GM percussion.

Instruments

Every instrument used here is free.

Tyrell N6 — u-he. Built from a Juno 60-derived design concept and code from an early version of Diva, which is why it handles volumes 01 through 04 so well.

Vital — Matt Tytel. Used for the digital FM and phase-distortion basses.

JC-303 — midilab. Free Open303-based TB-303 emulation for the acid basslines in volume 06. It reads accents and slides directly from the MIDI.

Regency — nakst. A phase-distortion synth used for one bass per volume. It has no filter; the distortion curves shape the tone and an envelope sweeps them.

Volume 05’s digital basses are supplied for both Tyrell and Vital, since neither is a perfect stand-in for a DX7 or CZ-101 and they fall short in different ways. For drums, see the reference kit maps. BPB Cassette Drums, DR-84, RF-Drums, and Sitala are all free, and the kit maps show exactly which folder to load into which instrument.

Licence

Use them on your own records, including commercial releases, without paying anything further. Do not resell or redistribute the files themselves.