SAMPLING SOUND SYSTEM: ROOTS REGGAE••••
(MIXED-MODE CD/AKAI CD-ROM)

Sampling giants East West and the Swedish company Sounds Good have put their heads together and come up with a budget library that delivers a good selection of sounds for a third of the price of regular sample CDs. Retailing at £19.95, all the discs in the library (currently seven releases) come as either dedicated Akai CD-ROMs (for the slightly higher price of £39.95), or as mixed-mode CDs featuring all the sounds in standard audio, WAV and AIFF formats. Volume seven, Roots Reggae, is a good example of how keeping the cost down doesn't have to mean compromising on quality. The standard of the material is just as you might expect from a major big-budget sample CD, but the actual recorded tracks take up only 32 minutes of CD time.

Roots Reggae contains a smaller than usual but none the less sensibly chosen selection of samples in the form of drum-kit loops, guitar grooves and licks, and Hammond B3 and Clavinet sampled phrases, as well as a good number of percussion and bass parts. Interestingly, this CD has a very 'traditional' reggae feel in that all of the parts are performed and recorded live; if some of the samples are a touch rough around the edges, it all adds to the overall laid-back style that any good reggae track delivers by the truckload. Although the drum loops and fills represent a good cross-section of current reggae flavours, the emphasis seems to be on the excellent Hammond and guitar chords and licks. The recording quality is good throughout. The layout of the samples within the tracks has also been thought through well: chords are provided in both major and minor for each of the 12 semitones in the octave. This flexible approach is also evident in the Clavinet licks and guitar loops: although not every possible combination of key signature is accounted for, there's still more than enough here to render this release useful and often quite inspiring.

Percussion-wise, all the reggae trademarks are featured (including some wonderful Timbale parts); the tempos range from 60 to 90bpm in increments of 10. Scattered among the groove and loop tracks are a handful of the individual percussion and single drum hits (mostly cymbals, hi-hats, snares and kick drums). These work well enough, and while the modest number provided here could never hope to compete with bigger releases, the sounds themselves are a welcome inclusion and eminently useable just the same. The presentation of these sounds as WAV files worked fine on my PC and I didn't find any major glitches to speak of, either.

In conclusion, for less than £20 you get access to a great source of raw, unprocessed reggae sample material. Sure, at only half an hour it's unlikely to keep sample-hungry power users amused for very long, but samplists working to a tight budget who are unwilling to sacrifice quality in their search for good material could do a lot worse that consult the Sampling Sound System. Paul Farrer

 

 

SAMPLING SOUND SYSTEM: POPPED VOL 1•••
(MIXED-MODE CD/AKAI CD-ROM)

Another volume in the Sound Sampling System from Sounds Good, Popped is part of the 'Drum Tools' section of the library. It basically consists of two drummers (Mats Persson and Christer Jansson) performing a series of loops, fills and individual single samples on a number of standard studio drum kits. As the title suggests, these loops have a strong pop bias -- as is freely admitted in the track titles, which name the bands or artists who 'inspired' the loops: Peter Gabriel, Tom Petty, The Who, XTC, Cream, The Small Faces, Blur and New Order among them. The audio section of the CD times out at just over 24 minutes and the drum loops are categorised according to tempo and stylistic content; as usual, the tempos go up 10bpm at a time, in this volume from 80bpm up as high as 150. This gives library owners a huge degree of flexibility when it comes to interchanging sampled loops and grooves between discs, and will also prove a big help to anyone without the ability to perform complex time-stretching or compression functions within their sampler.

The emphasis seems to be on more raw-sounding indie pop styles as opposed to hipper or more polished drumming. This effect works extremely well for a good number of the loops, but occasionally the 'rough and ready' approach gives the impression that the recording quality is not as good as it might be. There's a good range of snare and bass drum sounds, and the loops are faithful in tempo and style to the classic pop songs they have their roots in, but as the disc progresses to individual drum samples, there's more than just a hint of grottiness to a good number of the sounds.

As an introduction to the world of drum-sample CDs, Popped really does quite well: the flexibility of the tempo structures and the good number of fills and loops more than make up for the slightly disappointing single-hit samples -- and, of course, the fact that all the samples have been chopped up and are ready to load into your computer as WAV or AIFF files will be a great help to many users. The playing is of a suitably high quality, the layout is logical, and if you're looking for some solid beats with a rich 'indie' feel to them, Popped will satisfy most samplists for a short while, if not longer. Paul Farrer

£ Audio CD £19.95 each; Akai CD-ROM £39.95 each. Prices include VAT; add £3 for delivery.

A East West, Suite 1A, 25 Meeting House Lane, Brighton, East Sussex BN1 1HB, UK.

T Orders: Freephone +44 (0)800 393027; Enquiries: +44 (0)1273 736733.

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STRICTLY 12 INCH•••
(AUDIO CD)

E-lab started out by releasing rave-orientated sample CDs with attitude, and carved a unique niche for themselves in a market that was maybe just a little too precious. Since then they've expanded their repertoire dramatically, often extremely successfully.

The brief for Strictly 12 Inch is to enable you to strip down a song and make it so boringly repetitive that it becomes a hypnotic dance-floor utility -- there are drums with percussion, drums without percussion, and yet more drums with percussion, with four on the floor provided by the ubiquitous 909 throughout. All loops are prepared in stereo, and not too wide, and there's little or no reverb to be heard anywhere.

Track 1's demo is a typical mid-'90s 'remix' example, complete with 'Come on!' shout, sparse bass and drums, and a long-winded evolution: very stock in trade. (Though it sounds as though it was it knocked up in 15 minutes, it probably took all day.) Tracks 2 to 70 comprise several bars of programmed drum loops with parts dropping in and out, followed by the component loop snippets and single hits, but the beats never break beyond the bounds of 120 and 130bpm -- safe as houses!

Tracks 71 to 86 feature around 10 programmed drum loops each, with the bpm between 120 and 130; most are one-bar, some are two. All fade out after two or three cycles, annoyingly and for no good reason. Full beats with snare, kick and hats all going predominate, and several versions of many patterns are offered, with the only difference being how many voices are currently playing.

Then come banks of single hits, mostly from old Roland drum machines. This section I found the most interesting. Some drum-machine samples have been taken in quick succession while knobs are being twiddled; others have been successfully tweaked. I found tidy examples of 909 kick, snare, hats and claps, enough to set you on the right track if you're still looking for an authentic club sound. Unlike 16-bit drum machines and multitimbral synths, which only ever seem to be stocked with thin cymbals and toppy hats, these tracks have hi-hats with a bit of meat in them.

None of the beats are useless, but neither are there any really roasting rhythms, though I did pick off about 20 patterns into my sampler which I thought had sufficient movement in them to justify a little experimentation later. Don't expect to get inspired to write a hit tune when auditioning this CD, either: I found it somewhat lacking in both inspiration and usefulness. After all, if you're going to base a remix around a new programmed (as opposed to live or rare groove) drum beat, then having individual kick, snare, and hi-hat tracks is a must. A set of MIDI files corresponding to specified keyboard sample maps would have dramatically expanded the flexibility of this product -- and other products have done this before. There is, in fact, a second CD demo-ing several e-lab products which does contain some MIDI files, but none correspond to Strictly 12 Inch as far as I could ascertain -- a chance missed. And why didn't e-lab offer a set of topped and tailed ready-to-sample short loops, instead of a single long sequence per track which leaves significantly more twiddly work for hard-pressed samplists already suffering from terminal RSI to do? Because a half a minute or so of unbroken drums gives the untrained ear a clearer picture of how beats might work in a mix. Which prompts the question: who is this product aimed at? Not, I suspect, at experienced re-mixing engineers, or even your average SOS reader. No, you're looking at bedroom jocks with a couple of Technics turntables and a PC. That must limit the potential market for Strictly 12 Inch to about two million hopefuls in the UK alone... Wilf Smarties

£ £59.95 including VAT and UK p&p.

 

 

THAT JUNGLE FLAVOUR VOL II•••
(AUDIO CD)

This is the sequel to Zero-G's useful Vol I (though it wasn't called that then). Loops come first, 350 of them. One-, two-, and four-bar loops are presented as four-bar patterns with no sleeve indication of how many bars you really need to sample. I guess with RAM at a fiver for 128Mb nobody cares about wasting digital space any more, but my S770 can only stock up to 16Mb and there must be thousands of time-limited S1000s still in active service out there. The loops are mono, not entirely clean, and quite heavy on the snare. Nearly all are programmed using single hits or very short live snips, usually an eighth of a bar long. This tends to give a gated, nervous feel.

The initial impression is authentically jungly, but not as leftfield or as original and diverse in content as the very first Zero-G Junglist product, Jungle Warfare. This relied heavily on cliffhanger fills to provide drama, whereas the loops here chug along almost inconspicuously. Tempos are all around the 170 mark, though the occasional half-speeder is included.

Track 18 and a rubbery fade-in fill is the first pattern to really grab my attention; a bit of Keith Le Blanc-esque rrrrrrrrrrr sticks out on track 20. Tracks 25 and 26 espouse some pretty wild distortion. Track 28 includes some digital springiness and a time-stretched percussion part playing in more than one key, in the same pattern, at constant tempo. Interesting. Track 33 is worth checking out for a variety of reasons, filter-swept dub echoes and dual-speed cut-ups being two of the most persuasive. I do like the sound of filter envelopes mapped to key off or key on, or both. An old trick for S770 owners...

Suddenly it's stabs and tones time. Now this is more interesting: cartoons, horror and sci-fi, all with a light touch. Old classics re-appear, filtered or speeded up. A mish-mash of organ tones, orchestral strikes, weather, ethnic, rare and retro-synth samples (some of this reminds me of the excellent Cold Cut sample CD Kleptomania, in attitude if not in content). You can tell that these grubby samples are regarded with genuine affection by the creators of this disc.

Later you're hit by a set of spurious straight-from-the-synth shots, which are much less characterful than the found sounds, and probably irrelevant if you've got a decent soundcard: file under 'filler'. Some sustained chords suffer a three-semitone pitch-bend downwards after a second or two -- a typical jungle cliché, in case you hadn't noticed.

The last section features some West Indian bantering with the content shrouded in dub. This is followed by the world's shortest scratching section -- four OK samples -- and a digital tone, infuriatingly placed at the end of the CD as usual.

Could these loops be out-takes from the first volume? They certainly don't improve on the original. With a few notable exceptions, they steer a pretty safe course over well-charted territory -- more game park than jungle. And, of course, it's a year on, and a month is a long time in dance-floor styles. Wilf Smarties

£ £59.95 each including VAT and UK p&p.

A Time & Space, PO Box 306, Berkhamstead, Herts HP4 3EP, UK.

T +44 (0)1442 870681.

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