Summary - Audio quality is excellent. Couldn't detect any noise or recording artefacts anywhere. There is a some fairly heavy processing in a few places, though generally the use of effects isn't too prominent, mostly the samples sound very clean and open.

I would have to say that I did approach the CD with a little trepidation, imagining "15 years worth of leftover material cobbled together into a sample CD", but on listening to the CD for the first few times it definitely grew on me and my initial concerns were certainly disproved. There is a lot of variation through the CD, both in the sounds and the styles of the loops, from quite muted sparse loops, to complex, busy, big sounding grooves and lots in-between. Never getting far though from the live drummer sound, except where the more extreme processing (which is never that extreme) has been applied.

Most of the sounds are tight, clean and punchy and a lot of the playing is spot on, lots of foot tapping and head nodding in places, I liked the first section in particular. Lots of solid usable material, nice and open, allowing space for other elements in a mix. Throughout though there is a lot of high quality material, not especially spectacular, but very solid and usable.

As we mentioned earlier if your working in a tight genre then this might not be the release for you, the genre's this release covers go from jungle to soul, via reggae and pop. It probably suits slower styles of tracks, certainly my favourites were in the more laid-back material and much of the CD loops at under 100 BPM. However if your looking to make a wider variety of tracks, featuring live drum sounds then you will want to seriously consider this release.

Downsides - the variation through the CD doesn't lend itself to it being well organised, it's all laid out as well as it can be, but you can't go to just one section to look for something. It's more a case of listening to the CD a few times and marking down your favourites. Perhaps on a track or two there are too many variations, there are several into the double figures, if you want to use that groove then that's brilliant because you can't have to many, if it doesn't grab you then you'd prefer the space be given over to a different groove. You can't win them all!

Listening to "On Drums" reminds me of why I enjoy sampling so much. I replaced a loop I had programmed with individual hits off of my soundcard with a couple of loops off of the CD (taking about 2 minutes thanks to the .wav file version). Well, lets just say it didn't sound better, it sounded a lot better, brought it to life, but without dominating the entire character. I simply couldn't have programmed or obtained that sound anyway other than by using a sample (or hiring Phil Gould).

I would certainly recommend this CD be considered by anyone looking for a diverse range range of live sounding drums loops.

Overall - Value for money 10/10 - Usability 7/10 - Documentation 9/10 - Sonic Quality 9/10. Excellent live drums loops CD - 8.5/10

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