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Analog to Digital 2
Page 2/4

Atmospheres
- 43 samples - the first 5 tracks offer us a range of atmospheric
synthesised soundscapes. Machine Room gives us a dozen examples
of some metallic, clanging, drone and burbling effects. These would fit
well into an industrial type track, you can imagine a heavy drum loop
being layered or built over the top of these. Moving on to Planets
we have a variety of long, slowly evolving soundscapes, with suitable
burblings and effects, quite excellent, the last of which "Beyond
the Rings" is particularly effective.
Track 4, Jurassic Synth, gives us
shorter, heavier, darker drone type noises, with some lighter effects
on top. Despite its title, Temple of Doom, track 5 gives some relatively
lighter textures though with a rather more mysterious/sinister tone.
Next we have Living the Alien, somewhat
shorter, simpler, samples, though for that they are somewhat more playable
musically, the section rounds out with a minute long "sample"
called "Orb" which is more of a complete track in its own right.
There is quite audible noise on virtually
all the samples in this section which is a shame, especially as these
are the sorts of samples that would appear more in their own right than
buried deep in the mix. Whilst I wouldn't say it makes the samples unusable,
you'd probably be looking to use some noise reduction software to reduce
it though.
Loops & Tunes - 64 samples -
no BPM are given for these 8 tracks though which is a bit of a pain. Though
for some of the samples this would be hard to pick in any event, for the
others though the effort should have been made, makes life a little easier
for users.
The section starts off with Ambient Loopy
Tunes, seven suitably analog sounding loops, though not of the blippy
variety, full sounding arpeggio type loops, that make good use of the
stereo spectrum. The first two "mystic loops" being the pick.
Next up we have Ambient Loop Two, more of the same, though somewhat
lighter and more open in feel.
Ambient Trance Loops, somewhat more
random sounding in approach than the previous loops, there's nothing much
that stands out here. EMS Loops gives us 10 more machine like loops,
shorter, some of which are very hard on the ears, not very pleasant radio
static type sounds. Industrialist may be able to find some use for these,
but otherwise I'm struggling to think of uses for these ones.
Hard Loops, has a dozen harsh sounding
loops, and Analog Loops has five blippy loops, both tracks don't
sound particularly pleasant on the ear, the latter marginally better.
Whilst they sound suitably "hard" and sparse there isn't much
to recommend here.
Digilog Loops has mixed analog and
digital instruments to form more unusual sounding loops, and these are
somewhat of an improvement. More arpeggio sounding, some of these are
quite long, though there are usually filters operating while this happens
to produce some variation. Most of these are quite usable. The section
rounds off with Zap Loops, 6 samples of the space invader meets
radio interference high pitched variety. Mmmm, not to my taste.
Drums & Percussion - 104 Samples
- Firstly we have 6 tracks of fairly orthodox synthetic kicks, snares,
toms, hi-hats, claps and percussion. Nice variety and well recorded.
Next we have more unorthodox sounding percussion.
We have metallic gongs and backwards effects, followed by some analogue
blips for making into arpeggio's or loops. We have 5 heavy "ambient
zaps" that could be used as unusual drums.
Rounding out the section we have four tracks
of SFX Percussion, Metal and Fill effects. 25 samples of blips,
crashes, sweeps and blips, the fills are the picks of the section as a
whole, short fills that oscillate through the stereo field.

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