Review: Loopmasters Sound Science - Coldcut Sample Library

Library: Loopmasters Sound Science - Coldcut
Format: Available as download or DVD.
Genre: Breakbeat, Trip-hop, Edgy Hip-hop, Chillout, Lounge
Distributed by: Loopmasters
Price: DVD (with instant download too, so you don't have to wait) £39.95, download £34.95
Demo: Audio demos on the product page.

As a big fan of the UK Ninjatune Label, I was very excited to see this title show up in my mailbox. Coldcut, if you don't know, is a duo comprised of Matt Black and Jon More who, when they're not running Ninjatune, push the music and technology envelope with ground-breaking videos, legendary remixes, and head-bobbing live performances around the world. It really is no hyperbole to say that these two helped shape the use of sampling the way we know it today. So naturally, you'd expect a sample library put together by them would pretty well done.

This library is available both as a download or in physical format as a data DVD. It contains 620 MB of samples including bass loops, drum loops, musical loops, vocal & FX loops, and all manner of single hit drums, FX, and instrument multisamples if loops aren't your thing. As is usual for Loopmasters releases, the samples come in tons of ready to use formats including WAV, REX2, Acid, Reason, Halion, Kontakt, EXS-24, Apple Loops, Emulator X2, and more. As someone who remembers the days of audio-only sample CDs where you had to sample, edit, and build your own instruments, I really appreciate having everything laid out for me and ready to go.

So let's have a listen to the sounds themselves, shall we? The loops are divided up into folders by BPM with tempos at 70, 88, 100, and 133 BPM. This isn't a library where they just pointlessly repeat the same loops at different tempos, the loops in each tempo folder are totally unique (I think there are a handful of repeats, but this is the exception and not the rule). The REX files are put together very well, so you can still use the loops well outside their intended range without much problem. All musical loops contain the key in the file name for easy mixing and matching.

We start out with a selection of bass loops. These consist of everything from jazzy double bass riffs, to electric bass grooves, to gritty synth basslines. While there's less the 40 of them, what they lack in volume, they make up for with variety. A good number of different styles and feels are represented here and the production of each is fantastic.

Far more abundant are the drum loops, which number just over 150. From a sound quality standpoint alone, these are some of the best-sounding breakbeats I've heard. Everything is recorded very well and the tonal balance between splashy cymbals and punchy lows is as good as you could ask for. Here you'll find everything from beats played on a real drum kit, to loops made of chopped-up samples, to edgy, heavily-processed electronic rhythms. Many of the loops here also offer mutiple variations or fills.

Next up, we have a selection of just over 100 musical loops. These include riffs on electric piano, guitar, vintage synths, strings & brass and everything in between. Most of the loops are quite short, so these aren't likely to be the basis for an entire track, but they work well as cut and paste bits to fill out an arrangement and all have a nice edge of grit to them that's missing from a lot of sample library music loops.

The last section of loops are the vocals & FX. Some of these would be better suited as one-shots and spot type effects than loops, but they're set up to work perfectly in loop format if that's what you prefer. Here you'll find harmonized vocal snippets, spacey dub effects drenched in tape echo, strange synth noises, and lots of other odd sounds with a very authentic 'vintage' feel to them.

Rounding out the collection are a number of multi-samples and drum kits in various formats and it was here that I ran into the only flaw I could really find with the collection. I had problems with the sampler files for all of the multi-sampled bass and instrument sounds. I first tried loading them up in Logic's EXS-24 sampler and all the instruments had an odd volume tremolo and really slow attack times on them that rendered most of them useless. I then tried loading them into Native Instruments Kontakt 2, and although the crazy tremolo wasn't there, the slow attack still was. It made me wonder if perhaps they create the instruments in one particular soft-sampler and use a translation program to write it to other formats, as I know it is not unusual for things like this to happen during the translation process. Regardless, it's a pretty significant problem, and most people don't have the luxury of multiple samplers to use in case the instrument has been improperly programmed in their format of choice. Yeah, you can manually import the raw samples and build the instruments up from scratch, but that's no why you buy a ready-made library like this, right? (UPDATE: Loopmasters is aware of the problem now and has created corrected versions of the Kontakt and EXS files. These have been fixed on the downloadable versions of the library, but if you happen to have it in DVD format, you can write to them at: studio@loopmasters.com to get the corrected files.)

Fortunately, the one-shot drum sounds and drum kits don't seem to suffer from this problem, which is great because there's some really nice sounding stuff here. Kicks, snares, cymbals, and percussion are all on offer here and the production quality is up to the same gold standard as the rest of the library. Coldcut has managed to find just the right balance between vintage vibe and more modern production standards and all the sounds have that paradoxical combination of new and old. This is no easy thing to do, so they deserve to be lauded for that alone.

As far as break-beat type sample collections go, it'd be hard to go wrong here. There's tons of variety, the sound and production quality is second to none, and the loops all work with one another almost effortlessly. I'm giving this a 9.5/10. The only thing keeping it from being a full 10 are the botched multisamples, but as these represent less than 20 sounds out of the collection, I'm just going to knock off half a point for the apparent lack of QC. That small problem aside, this really is a nice collection that will leave you eagerly awaiting the next chapter.

Here's a brief demo I put together using some of the factory loops in Spectrasonics Stylus RMX. No external effects, compression, or EQ was added. Everything is coming straight out of Stylus.

Dirt Cheap Ensoniq ESQ-1 on Ebay

The Ensoniq ESQ-1 was a synth that had digital oscillators, but analog filters and it can sound amazingly warm for a digital synth. This is a really underrated machine, and this guy is selling his for only $100. The flaws are, the internal battery is dead (so it won't retain new patches you write to it, but that's what SYS-EX is for...you can also have it replaced if you like...) and there is a chip on the bottom 'C' key. This is an absolute steal...

I've got nothing to do with the auction, but as someone who has owned 2 SQ-80's (an expanded ESQ-1) and an ESQ-1, I know this will make someone out there happy for such a cheap price.

More info at the listing...

Hitting the Ground Running

I don't know about you, but I always seem to have about a thousand things to juggle all at once. In addition to all the writing, recording, and touring for my band, I do a lot of mixing, remixing, and production for other artists as well. Add into this designing the merchandise, running my band's online store, maintaining the website and social network sites, answering e-mails, and - oh yeah- writing this blog, you get the picture. I'm a bit busy.

Inspiration, when it strikes, usually does so out of the blue, and almost always when I am in the middle of doing something else. Since time is not a commodity I have a whole ton of, I wanted a way to be able to get ideas down quickly so I could get back to whatever the task at hand is. My solution was to create a template for my DAW with a basic layout designed to let me get my idea down fast.

This has been something I've done for years, but now Logic allows you to save different templates that come up whenever you open a new file. Regardless of your DAW of choice (others may have this feature too, I'm just not familiar enough with them to know for sure), all you really need to do is set it up and save it as a song file you can load up whenever a cool idea pops into your head.

What your template contains will largely depend on what kind of music you make, but try to make it as flexible as possible to suit any sort of idea you might need to jot down. You just want to create channels of software instruments that are preloaded with the types of sounds you need just to make a basic sketch of a song. Don't worry too much about picking cool sounding patches, you want something pretty generic and boring just to get the idea across. You can worry about the sounds themselves when you actually start working on the song later.

I usually start with a drum loop of some sort so that I have a rhythm to write to. Nothing fancy, just a four on the floor kick, snares on the 2 and 4, and an eighth-note hi-hat line - something that can be used with just about any idea. Then I make a channel with a generic synth bass, one with a generic lead sound, one with a generic pad or string sound, and one with a piano sound of some sort. This way, I have pretty much every type of sound I need to get the very basics of an idea down. All I have to do is have an idea, open up my template, play my idea into the sequencer, save it to a separate file (don't overwrite your template!), and I have a (hopefully) cool idea I can come back to later to flesh into an actual song when things are a bit less hectic.

This technique has another advantage as well. Because you're using the same sounds every time you sketch an idea out, you aren't distracted by fancy presets or ear candy. Instead, you can concentrate on the actual musical idea itself to sort out whether or not it's as good as you initially thought it might be. It's often been said that a proper song is something you can sit down and play with just a guitar or piano. This isn't quite that extreme, but it plays to the same basic principle: sticking to a few generic sounds will make you concentrate more on the music itself and less on the gimmicky parts of a song (as fun as those may be).

Do you use templates to get down ideas? What's in yours?

Poll Shows Young People Prefer the Compressed Sound of MP3's Versus Uncompressed Music

Oh, this does not bode well at all.

According to an article on Gizmodo, a professor of Music at Stanford conducts a yearly survey to students where he plays back music in various formats to find what the students preferences were. After 6 years of studying, the results showed that the students actually preferred the sound of crappy quality MP3's (a bit rate of 128, for example) over the original, uncompressed audio or even the other MP3's at higher rates.

I don't know what this means for the future of music, but it's nothing good, that much is sure.

Devo Reuinites for New Album

UK newspaper The Guardian reports that new wave legends Devo have reunited to work on a new album, their first in nearly 20 years. Based on the promise of the "Watch Us Work It" single they did in 2007, I'm cautiously optimistic. I haven't been nuts about too much of the band's later work (although each album usually had a good track or two...), but maybe the band feels enough time has passed that they can revisit their classic style? That would certainly fit their de-evolutionary schtick, wouldn't it?

Synthesizers.com 66 Space Modular System on Ebay

If you've been wanting a modular but wanted to get a head start on building a monstrous wall o' synth instead of buying it piecemeal, here you go!

Info on the included modules at the listing...

Logic's Little-known Enveloper

Maybe it's a hazard of living in a musical age of plenty, but with my plug-in folder stuffed to the gills with all manner of crazy effects, sometimes I forget about some of the cool plug-ins that came built-in to Logic. For whatever reason, it seems that some of the effects get more love than others, but there are probably a few that you would use if you just knew what purpose it serves. Logic's Enveloper is one such plug-in. Transient designers seem to be all the rage these days with tons of companies releasing their own versions, but Logic comes with a pretty cool one right out of the box.

The Enveloper basically allows you to reshape the amplitude envelope of a sound using a simple Attack-Release envelope and gain settings. To use it to add some snap to a synth bass or drum sound, do the following.

1. Set the THRESHOLD to -100. This controls when the effect kicks in, and for the purposes of this demonstration, we want everything to trigger it.

2. Turn your first GAIN (the attack gain) up to around 70-80%. What we're doing here is to increase the volume of the initial attack of the sound, thus giving it a bit more bite.

3. This doesn't sound like much yet, but turn the attack pretty much all the way up, to lengthen the amount of time that initial loudness lasts, and you should hear a significant difference in the attack of your sound.

Play around with different settings and you'll see this plug-in can be useful not only for adding snap to sound, it can also work the opposite way if you use a slower attack. This might come in handy if you, say, had a guitar recording where the pick noise is too loud.

Here is a 'before and after' clip demonstrating the plug-in on a synth bass sound.

Roland MKS-80 Super Jupiter on Ebay

The MKS-80 is sort of a hybrid of the Jupiter-6 and Jupiter-8 polysynths. Not as fun to program as the keyboard version, but an optional external programmer (the MPG-80) made things much easier.

More info at the listing...

Make Old School Video Game Music in Massive

(Click the image above to enlarge.)
Native Instruments Massive is an amazing synth. I'll admit, I wasn't sold when I first tried the demo, but once I got beyond the presets and started delving into programming it myself, I saw the light. I'm a modulation freak, and Massive is brimming with it. I especially find the Steppers and Performers to be a lot of fun, and used correctly, you can use them to make complete music arrangements (albeit simple ones).

Today, I'm going to show you how to use these modulators to make a little musical loop that sounds straight out of a 1980's arcade game.

1. Open up an instance of Massive and select File->New Sound to give you the init patch to start from.

2. On OSC1, select the Plysaw1 wavetable. If you play a few notes while fiddling with the WT-POSITION knob, you'll hear that it's a sawtooth wave that adds overtones and eventually, multiple harmonically related notes. We're going to use that characteristic to make a little melody.

3. Turn the AMP knob of OSC1 all the way down to zero. We're going to use a sequencer to control the volume automatically. Do this by heading down to the modulation section, clicking on one of the green square marked 8 LFO, and change it to a STEPPER using the little grey pulldown menu right below it. Make sure SYNC is selected, and that the stepper ratio is 1/16 for sixteenth notes. Use the RNDM menu to RANDOMIZE ALL to generate a random sequence. You can, of course, program the values manually as well. Now grab the modulation crosshairs (that cross-shaped icon next to the text in the green 8 STEPPER box) and drop it into the modulation slot under OSC1's AMP knob. Click and push up in the modulation slot to turn the amount of modulation all the way up.

4. Go ahead and turn OSC1's WT-POSITION knob all the way down and, in repeat the above process in the 7 LFO slot. Drag the modulation crosshairs from here to the modulation slot for OSC1's WT-POSITION. You should now here a cheesy little melody. Let's add some rhythm to it.

5. Turn on OSC2 and call up the SMOSQU wavetable. Use the 5 LFO slot to call up another stepper and program a sparse sequence. Just a trigger here and there. Drag the modulation crosshairs from 5 STEPPER to the slot under OSC2's AMP. Turn the AMP level here all the way down, and then increase the modulation amount to aabout 60%. This doesn't sound like much yet, but give me a second.

6. Go down and turn on the NOISE oscillator and select the WHITE noise type. Head on up to the 6 LFO slot and this time change it to PERFORMER. If you've never used it before, the PERFORMER is just like a fancier version of the STEPPER. It allows you to draw in different shapes for more complex modulations. It defaults to a simple, straight 16ths pattern which is perfect for what we need to do. Just make sure SYNC is selected and that the ratio is set to 1/16.

7. Now, drag modulation crosshairs to both the AMP level of the NOISE section (the AMP knob should be set at zero with modulation amount cranked all the way up), and to the PITCH modulation slot of OSC2 (with the pitch range set to 5.00). This turns OSC2 into the goofy sort of synth drums that were so prevalent in those games. If you've done everything right, you should have something that sounds like this:


This is really just the beginning. Want to add a little more authenticity? Call up a BITCRUSH effect on one of the inserts. And we haven't even turned on OSC3, so you can add still more complexity if you want. Have fun!

Download "MoonPatrol" patch for Massive.

Arp/Rhodes Chroma on Ebay

Originally designed by Arp, and then picked up by Rhodes after Arp went under. Only 3,000 of these were made.

More info at the listing...

Review: Loopmasters Deep, Tech, & Minimal House

Library: Loopmasters Deep, Tech & Minimal House
Format: Available as download or DVD.
Genre: That'd be Deep, Tech & Minimal House
Distributed by: Loopmasters
Price: DVD (with instant download too, so you don't have to wait)£39.95, download £34.95
Demo: Audio demos on the product page.

Today I'll be taking a look at one of the latest sample libraries from Loopmasters: Deep, Tech, & Minimal House. The title pretty much tells you all you need to know about what's on offer here - a ton of loops, percussion, stabs, and basses specially designed for use in the techier, futuristic side of house. Altogether, there is 1.2 GB of original content offered in just about every format known to man. Seriously, if you've got a soft-sampler, there is an option for you. Just load up the finished patches in your preferred format, and you're up and making music right away. I really wish more sample libraries did this. I think if you have to interrupt you music making to take the time to map out the instruments yourself, it sometimes counteracts the creative spark libraries like this are meant to provide. Oh, and all the source files are 24-bit.

Overall, this library gives you everything you need to make convincing sounding tracks in the tech styles incredibly fast. In addition to a large selection of standard drum loops and glitched drum loops, there are a variety of bass loops, lead loops, chord & sequence loops, and a few vocal loops. The key of each musical loop is listed in the track name, so it's very quick and easy to mix and match elements. The drum loops all contain multiple, very useful variations of each beat, allowing you to build a complete rhythm track for your song entirely out of loops should you wish to. The sound quality is great and amazingly consistent, which means all the loops compliment each other and work together effortlessly. It's also worth noting that the sounds and sequences all sound very current and up-to-date and that the melodic loops were actually quite good. With most sample libraries I've tried, no matter how good the other content is, the musical loops always seem to lack something. This is happily not the case here and the musical bits ooze authenticity.

If using loops isn't your thing, there is also a variety of drum sounds, bass sounds, pads, heavily effected vocals, stabs, and other sounds for making your own. The quality here is consistent with that of the loops - fantastic! The drum sounds in particular are very nicely produced and mesh together very nicely.

Honestly, I really can't find anything to fault with this collection. The sound quality is superb, the loops are convincing, and the individual sounds are as excellent as they are abundant. If you do any sort of futuristic house, this could be provide some great inspiration, but I could see this also appealing to people who do any sort of funky IDM, techno, or even industrial types looking to add some Haujobb-y type sounds to their mixes. I'm giving this one a 10/10.

Here's a quick demo I threw together in about 20 minutes using their loops. Tracks are coming straight out of Stylus RMX with no additional effects, EQ, or compression, just the loops as they come:

Oberheim Matrix-6R on Ebay

Rackmount version of the highly regarded Oberheim Matrix-6. Shares the same sound architecture as the Matrix-1000, but the 6 is actually programmable.

More info at the listing...

Daft Punk to Do Score for Tron 2.0?

According to the L.A. times, French robo-rockers Daft Punk are rumored to be doing the score for Disney's upcoming sequel to the 80's groundbreaking computer movie Tron. I personally am not a fan of Daft Punk at all, but even I have to admit that would be an inspired choice, if true.

Free Impulse Responses for Convolution Reverbs

KVR forum member vieres has taken great pains to sample some nice sounding reverbs from Lexicon and Quantec and posted them online to share for those of you with convolution reverbs that can make use of such things. Be sure to throw him a donation if you find them useful!