King Key

What it does

A free sampler made from the sounds of things people type on: a typewriter, a computer keyboard, a MIDI keyboard, and kits built from those recordings alongside typewriter bells and buzzes. Each sound runs into a filter with cutoff and resonance, a sample rate reducer that goes down to 20 Hz, a bit depth control that goes down to one bit, drive with an offset, and a reverb. Every one of those has two modulation slots, fed by two LFOs, an envelope, key velocity, aftertouch or the mod wheel.

In the demo

Jade plays each sound set from a keyboard, then drags an LFO onto cutoff and an envelope onto resonance and reverb mix so the clicks start moving. She closes by building a slow piece with Scaler feeding a harmonizer into King Key, with the developer’s earlier free app after it.

Worth knowing

It is a small one-shot sample set released for International Joke Day, around 12 MB, with no way to load your own samples. Caelum Audio gives away a desktop version from its own site. There is no manual, which Jade gives as her reason for covering a free app at all.