Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
For those of you who haven’t yet come across Ueberschall (the German word for Supersonic), their history stretches back to the late ’80s, when founder Uwe Kinast was releasing floppy disks for the Akai S1000. They now have more than 200 products available across more than 40 musical genres, including jazz, hip‑hop, rare groove and rock.
Jazz Up is a jazz trio (drums, bass and piano) 5.7GB loop library offering 10 complete construction kits that contain a total of 938 loops and phrases. Within each kit is a full mix and stems and you’re offered intros, outros, multiple A and B sections and piano solos.
This loop library covers a range of styles, from straight through to contemporary jazz, and is all recorded to the same high quality as their many other offerings, with dry and processed options available. The trio of talented session musicians performing on the tracks are Eike Wulfmeier (piano), Jürgen Attig (bass) and Matthias Meusel (drums).
The tracks either feature an acoustic or electric piano, although you can ultimately select either. For the acoustic parts, Eike used a tweaked Moddart Pianoteq New York Steinway Grand D rather than his own acoustic grand, making it easier to offer dry and processed versions, and it sounds satisfyingly close to the real thing. The electric piano parts were recorded using in‑house samples.
Jürgen used a de‑fretted Fender Jazz Bass from 1962, a Fender Precision Bass from 1966 and a Music Man Stingray from 1978. A Radial JDV MkIII active DI box was used for recording.
Matthias employed two different Ludwig kits along with a Ludwig Acrolite Snare from 1970, a Trixon Snare from 1959, a Tama Starphonic Snare, plus Istanbul and Meinl Byzance traditional cymbals. The kits were recorded using stereo Neumann KM184s for the overheads, stereo Sennheiser MKHs for the room, Neumann TLM103 and TLM127 mics for the toms and a Neumann TLM127 and two Shure SM57s for the snare, all of which are available as stems.
The extensive number of stems make it a versatile library that can be used in acid jazz, dance, lo‑fi, hip‑hop, soundtracks and more.
While jazz might not be your genre, the extensive number of stems make it a versatile library that can be used in acid jazz, dance, lo‑fi, hip‑hop, soundtracks and more, not to mention chopping the tracks for grabbing individual sounds. If you’re a budding jazz musician, it also doubles up as a useful way to practise your chops alongside a real band.
Although designed to be used in the free Elastik plug‑in, which is available in VST2, VST3, AU, AAX and standalone formats, the files can be easily exported as WAVs.
In summary, Jazz Up is an extremely useful collection of top‑quality sample loops, played brilliantly by three talented musicians, and definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for some jazzier‑sounding chord progressions and voicings for your tracks.
€99
€99