Sample Libraries

Rating: **** 4/5 Stars. Vintage Country is a collection of both playable instruments and performance loops designed to capture the authentic sound used in, well, vintage country recordings.

Rating: ***** 5/5 Stars. With Smack II, Big Fish Audio are clearly attempting to deliver the complete one‑stop shop for your body percussion needs.

BFA's Momentum combines samples and loop manipulation with an irresistible price tag.

The 2GB Vintage Vocals library offers three different female singers, a range of performance articulations and, of course, the same ‘retro’ sonic target.

Both volumes in the bundle provide a selection of multi-sampled, multi-articulation, virtual brass instruments that are playable in exactly the same way as a conventional orchestral sample library is but are much more suited to soul, funk and pop.

Grindhouse provides a collection of playable instruments that aim to capture the musical essence of some of the more popular sub-genres of the B movie/exploitation film soundtrack.

Country music can come in a rough and ready hoedown format, but that’s not what BFA’s Country Guitars is about. The material is radio-friendly and absolutely ready for your next modern country rock chart assault.

The main Accelerate title might be a bit ambiguous, but the sub-title of this Big Fish Audio sample library —...

Designed by Sonicsmiths and released through Big Fish Audio, The Foundry is a Kontakt 5 virtual instrument that is aimed most obviously at sound designers.

Fuse is a Kontakt instrument that serves as a music ‘workstation’, but with a distinctly urban slant.

Fancy a little Smack? Then think again, because Smack is a rather neat virtual instrument sample library .

Multi-format

Multi-format

The exciting thing about sample libraries that use words like 'ambient' and 'soundscape' in their titles is that you just can't predict what they are going to sound like.

Big Fish Audio's Pop Rocks! (their exclamation mark, not mine) is the company's latest addition to their massive genre-based...

If BFA could make a TV ad for this sample collection, they would probably have it narrated by the late movie trailer maestro Don LaFontaine, saying something like, "In a world of laid-back percussion, Epic Drums II changed everything, forever!”

Although the main title of this sample collection from Big Fish Audio only mentions pop and soul, the content also covers R&B guitar styles...

Rock drum collections are plentiful, but as soon as something slightly out of the ordinary is required, such as a comprehensive selection of brush samples, the options die off rapidly.

Not content with the 'ooh missus!' title, Big Fish have based this new construction-kit library around the playing of a guitarist called Thomas Organ (thankfully, 'Tommy O' to his mates.)

I've yet to clap eyes on the Kurtis Chance Big Band Orchestra, but on the evidence of this new collection of 15 construction kits (comprising around 7GB of audio)

This library's content is available in Acid, WAV, Apple Loops, REX and RMX formats and amounts to 3967 samples (1290 WAVs) for...