BASICUSSIONS••••
2-CD AUDIO CD & AKAI-FORMAT CD-ROM SET

France has never really been a country instantly associated with the production of great sampled sound sources, preferring to concentrate on the other things that they make so well, such as wines, cheeses and nuclear fallout in the South Pacific [steady on, old boy -- Assistant Ed]. Univers-Sons are a company based in Paris hoping to buck this trend, and to this end, they have produced a mixed-mode two-CD release interestingly titled Basicussions -- The Ultimate Percussion Tools. CD one is given over entirely to conventional audio tracks of numerous percussion loops including shakers, tambourines, triangles, congas, bongos and jembes. The loops are presented in a number of different musical styles, such as funk, fusion, latino, and swing, and are recorded at three main tempo settings, 89, 100 and 119bpm (although there are a couple at 133.5bpm). Within each tempo set, there are usually between three and seven different percussive variations on a theme, and these are designed to slot effortlessly together, allowing the user to construct their own percussion tracks with relative ease.

CD two contains all the Akai CD-ROM data, as well as 16 tracks of audio featuring recordings of single shots of all the individual percussion sounds used in the loops. As you might expect, the CD-ROM part of the disc is pretty much an exact copy of the audio CD, except for a bonus section at the end featuring an enormous selection of wonderful drum sets pillaged wholesale from the likes of the best Roland, Alesis, Yamaha and Emu drum modules. This is actually quite a neat and usable inclusion, with some of best sounds coming from the Roland 'House' and 'Latino' kits. On the CD-ROM, each partition and volume is listed with its size in megabytes, and with a few exceptions, you will be pleasantly surprised just how memory-efficient many of these programs are. Anyone with the patience to build a complete track from the tambourine or triangle upwards will probably enjoy tracks 24 to 35 on disc one, but the rest of us can ignore these 'white elephants' and delight in the fact that Basicussions represents very good value for money (the two-CD set retailing at just £59.95).

On the whole, this release has an easy-going and largely creative feel to it. The layout is logical and the recorded quality of the samples is just as good as we have come to expect. The strongest part of the release is almost certainly the mixed percussion loops at the start of the discs, but the conga and bongo loops are also highly authentic and very, very funky. Where other releases bombard us with every conceivable odd drum and shaker extracted from the rainforests of South America, this release gives us a sensible collection of well played and recorded percussion loops using just a few favourite and well chosen instruments. If you want a strong latin funk feel and you like your sounds edited and ready to go, with a free audio CD to audition them with, you could do a lot worse than put Basicussions very high up on your wish list. Paul Farrer

£ £59.95 including VAT.

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SAMPLING SOUND SYSTEM VOL 5: G-SOUL••••
MIXED-MODE CD/AKAI CD-ROM

This is another volume in East West and Sounds Good's budget Sampling Sound System range of CDs. Also available in Akai format, this mixed-mode CD has PC and Mac sample data plus the same material repeated as audio. Track 1 contains the PC-format (WAV) and Mac-format (AIFF) data packs, so don't go playing it on your CD. I have a PC, but auditioning audio from WAV files is much more tedious than simply playing audio, so, moving swiftly on...

Tracks 2 to 4 each contain 12 splendid lurching sexy loops at 70bpm. I can imagine Barry White crooning along with some fretless bass and a Fender Rhodes propping up the key. Then again, if I was feeling a little more adventurous, I might superimpose a jungle beat at 140bpm... Programming is in stereo with scant use of reverb. A wide palette of sounds is sensitively employed and inventively juxtaposed while the loops, even when they are falling over, feel well together.

The format stays the same, but the tempos wind up in 10bpm stages through 80, 90, 100 and finally all the way to 110bpm. Slow as that is, it feels positively rushed after all those 70bpm gems. There are some four-on-the-floor patterns, but hip-hop is what the people who put this CD together understand best. After the drums come all-too-few guitars: 12 clean, warm soulful licks that've probably been plundered already. Then some pretty neat synth, bass and orchestral hits, then some drum singles, and suddenly it's all over, in what seems like about 20 minutes.

Conclusion: With the emergence of UK soul as a commercial force to be reckoned with,this release is right on cue, with its creamy, high-quality, fresh soul drum loops and hits. It's short, but very sweet (and cheap!). Wilf Smarties

£ Mixed-mode CD £19.95; Akai CD-ROM £39.95. Prices include VAT.

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DIDGERIDOO•••
AUDIO CD/AKAI & SAMPLECELL-FORMAT CD-ROM

This is one of those discs that sprung up as the result of somebody's obsession, and you only need to take one look at the sleeve below to guess that the obsessed Peter Spoecker is a West Coast American on walkabout! Touring the outback on a bicycle, and taking his own digeridoo with him, Peter recorded a huge amount of material, and for those of you who think the digeridoo is little more than a flatulent vacuum cleaner, the variety and virtuosity demonstrated on this library should be a real eye-opener. However, if you read the sleeve notes carefully, it's implied that Peter played all these didge samples himself, which begs the question: what did he do with all those aboriginal recordings?

Even such an obvious obsessive as Peter Spoecker couldn't justify filling the whole disc with digeridoo, so you'll also find ethnic American Indian flutes, bullroarers, doo drums (melodic drums) and jaw's harp sections. On the whole, the quality of the samples is excellent, especially the digeridoo drones, and rhythmic loops, but the North American Indian flutes turned out to be disappointing in some areas. While the individual melodies and flourishes were nice enough, the multisampled flutes were unlooped, and weren't set up for vibrato, but worst of all, they sounded less convincing than most cheap synth flute patches. As the owner and occasional doodler on such a flute, I can say with some conviction that these could have sounded a lot better. And why is it that sample CD-ROM makers don't map the multisamples onto one section of the keyboard and put the odd phrases on another within a single program, rather than putting them in different programs altogether? Surely that would be the most logical way of enabling you to join up the melodic snippets with tunes of your own? Finally, a quick warning to other Akai S2000 owners (that's what I used for the review, and discovered this problem on): be careful to load up just the samples and programs you want rather than loading in whole volumes and then using the data wheel to run through the different ones. If you load the whole volume, all the programs play at once, regardless of which one is selected, which means a visit to the edit page to sort things out. This happens on certain other sample discs too; I guess it all comes down to which generation of Akai sampler the discs were written for.

It's poetic justice that I ended up reviewing this disc after the 'build your own plastic digeridoo' project I put in SOS a couple of years ago [see SOS August '95, flatulent hoover fans], but it really does demonstrate the versatility of the instrument, especially its rhythmic capabilities. With the exception of the flute multisamples, the sounds are both well sampled, plentiful, and generally come in a choice of musical keys. Some Multis are also included for instant multitimbral gratification. You'll need as much memory as possible to enjoy some of the longer samples, though most fit into 16Mb of RAM. Paul White

£ Audio CD £69.95; CD-ROM £199. Prices include VAT.

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VINTAGE KEYBOARDS•••
AKAI & SAMPLECELL-FORMAT CD-ROM

It seems that anything vintage is fashionable, and in the keyboard line, that usually means analogue or mechanical. And that's exactly what you get in this aptly named library, which kicks off with a good selection of Hammond B3/Leslie programs, though for some extraordinary reason, the manufacturers have decided to name these programs using combinations of 0s and 8s, with just the odd 4 thrown in for good measure. For all I know, this could be a cryptic code for the drawbar settings, but if it is, the sleeve notes fail to mention it. The rest of the instruments are conventionally named, though as with the aforementioned Didgeridoo disc, my Akai S2000 played all the programs at once when I loaded up an entire volume, so you have to load just the program you want to use.

I have to say the Hammonds are really good, and there's a choice of Leslie speeds, but what really won me over was the regrettably short section devoted to the Sequential Prophet VS, where the Dark Strings patch must be the definite analogue string pad of all time. The evolutionary ladder continues via the OSCar (mainly basses), Sequential Circuits Pro One, Moog Taurus, Farfisa combo organ, Vox Continental (weren't they dreadful?), ARP String Ensemble, Oberheim Matrix 12/OBXa/OB8, Clavinet, Rhodes and of course the Wurlitzer electric piano. Then comes the Mellotron -- just strings and voice, and as rough as a porcupine's bum, but the die-hards will like it. Personally, I think the memory of the Mellotron is a whole lot nicer than the real thing!

Moog gets a look in under the Minimoog and Memorymoog sections, but although there are plenty of techno blips and deep basses, there didn't seem to be any of those wonderfully fluid lead sounds that Minimoogs do so well. Roland's Jupiter 8, JX8P, Juno 106 and JX3P are given a brief outing, as is the ARP 2600, which it's nice to be able to use polyphonically. Lesser ARPs, such as the Odyssey, are also included. Of course, the Roland TB303 makes an appearance; the Chase Bit 01 also puts its head around the door briefly, and there's a token Korg in the form of the DW8000. Given that many of these samples make use of the Akai's own filters (and surprisingly nice they can be too), they still tend to take up quite a lot of space, with most at between 1.5 and 5Mb. This may be short by normal sample standards, but when you only have to sample basic waveforms, the loops can be very short indeed.

On the artistic merit front, the sounds are well sampled and convincingly analogue, but you rarely get more than half a dozen examples per instrument, unless you're a Hammond B3 fan, in which case this is your lucky day. Personally, after hearing the Prophet VS samples, I'd have settled for a disc full of nothing else! The quality is great, but the frustratingly small selection from each instrument pushes me in the direction of a modest 3.5 rating, though if you're buying this purely for the B3 samples, you'll probably rate it much higher. Paul White

£ £199 including VAT.

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