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Aquasky
Electro House & Breaks

£34.95 Loopmasters
distributed through Time & Space

Reviewing these two new sample CDs from Loopmasters made me realise how far sample CDs have come in the last few years. I remember in the early 90's (pre-internets) having to shell out £60 for a sample CD purely from a description of it in Sound On Sound or Future Music. It was always a hit and miss affair, but I learned one lesson from this: it was best to stay away from buying CDs in the same genre you were working in. So if you're making House music and you bought "House Club Sounds 3" you would often end up disappointed.

Fast forward to 2008 and it seems that with these two new sample DVDs you're getting total value for money, both of them retailing at £34.95 each. Everything is organized into every sample format you can think of, which really saves time if you, say, want to use a rex file within your sampler, but then also use an Apple Loop within the same project - so no more getting busy with Recycle and killing your flow! You can hear the quality when an already established producer puts their name to sample projects like these.

These guys have been successful in a number of different genres, from Intelligent D&B (I love that term, time to bring it back) through to Breaks which they have been championing since 1997 with their excellent Passenger label. The nature of this DVD is everything I hoped for, clean breaks, percussion and most importantly lots of bass! The DVD is broken up into different folders. Lets look at the drums first.

Drums - Loops and Single Hits

The drum loops are broken down into Breaks and Electro House plus some great drum fills. First impressions of the breaks loops are good - they have a good clean programmed sound to them but still feel organic due to it sounding like the single hits have been used from live breaks. Each loop is broken down into Basic, Full, and Hats, so you can have your own variations of the grooves. The Percussion/Shaker/Tamb loops are very usable and would be an asset no matter what field of music you work in. The Drum Fills folder consists of 15 loops that are thankfully mainly live fills and not computer programmed, and again any producer will find these fills a useful assest in their drum arsenal. The House selection of drum loops are of equal quality and sound to the breaks folder, and will be good for the producers that want to use a quick loop to get an idea going and from there can delve a bit deeper with excellent percussion parts.

Bass

With a mainly breaks oriented sample CD you are going to expect a good array of filthy bass sounds. The Bass folder starts with a nice heavy moog loop and 3 variations of this with different effects and filters etc. The variations are actually very usable rather just sticking the same sample though a low pass filter like you hear on so many sample cds, just to get the sample file numbers up! You can hear a lot of effort has gone into making these bass sounds - it's so refreshing to not hear a boring 808 sample from C1 to C8!

Musical Loops

This folder has some nice layer lines, appreg type parts and glitchy type sounds. For this it is excellent, but I feel it does lack some rich pads or chords, but again this is a minor criticism and I find these top lines more useful as I would usually play my own chords/pads myself. The fact that all of these are ready to go as "rex/acid/whatever you use!", makes them really inspirational for starting off an idea.

Vocals

Judging vocal samples on their own and not in the context of a track is always really difficult. Here we have vocals recorded by Rebecca Riley and the Ragga Twins. The female vocals are full of attitude in that electro house style, and give across that the vocalist is the kind of girl that would be chewing gum when meeting your mum for the first time! There are also some soulful lines and the usual "take me higher" quotes, but this is the stuff that works time and time again. Ragga Twins add an air of realness which so many other sample cds miss when doing ragga/dancehall type vocal lines. The vocals on this DVD are such a great addition and first of all I overlooked them due to wanting to try out the breaks & bass first, but they will be on my studio HD for years to come.

FX & Instruments

The effects section is broken down into single hits, scratch parts and wah loops. All are of good quality but I found myself drawn to the single hits the most, with some great rises and ear candy that is ever so essential for dance music production. You also get for your money an assortment of sampled instruments which come in the usual Halion/EXS/NNXT formats, but I found myself still finding all the loops the most useful, and felt like the instruments were a token gesture. Again a minor complaint – I felt like I had my moneys worth when I got to the second set of Bass sounds.