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Sample Material-International
Free Zone
Page 2/4

Note - Every track has 12
samples, except tracks 10, 35, 42 & 45..
Zone Ambient - The CD proper starts
off with 4 tracks of Ambience. The first track has the longest
samples, around 20 seconds each, of alien, ethereal, soundscapes, that
constantly move and evolve through their duration. Some are very slow,
others have a kind of dripping, wind or distorted chime like sound to
add an effect. All are dark and foreboding. Totally excellent.
The remaining three tracks have somewhat
more shorter duration, down to around 10 seconds. These
carry on the general dark alien kind of feel, with some new effects as
well as those on track 2, insect like, sounds, distant alarms, analog
like bleeps and chirps, swirling effects, industrial type noises and so
forth. A few rather feel like they've been cut off in their prime, so
some looping may be in order if you want a longer effect.
Tracks 6-9 gives us 48 samples of Ambient
FX. where have all manner of unusual sounds, many up in the 10-20
second range. Some sound like the effects used in the earlier section,
without the background ambience. Others are almost soundscapes in their
own right, but the space, alien, science fiction film soundtrack type
sounds continue. Ethereal like pads, weird alarm like sounds, analogue
like static, deep throbbing tones, slow vaguely chime/choir like pads,
synthetic machine like rhythms. Some could be looped to form whole ambience
type tracks on their own, or dropped in. These are really good, I couldn't
find one I'd call bad.
The section winds up with 6 Environment
samples, fairly short samples samples of real (or incredibly good synthetic
!) ambient effects of birds, rain forest or traffic (must be New York
by the number of horns being sounded !).
After that really most excellent of starts
we move on to:-
Zone Rhythm - The section kicks off
with 4 tracks of Ambigrooves , these are loops that have a BPM
of 70-120, 36 of the samples have BPM's of 90 or 100. These as you can
guess by the title, are loops suited to a sort of ambient track, there
are a few straight orthodox percussion samples, but the more interesting
ones use a whole variety of sounds, shakers, toms, bongos, clicks, synthetic
percussion, sorts of, well, aquatic sounding ambience and tones. There
are a whole host of slightly unusual sounding loops here, generally very
good indeed. The only downside is that many of the loops feature background
tones, which some people may find restrictive as the loops sound very
full.
Next we have three tracks of Metaloops,
which have BPM's of 70-130, which contain a number of differing effects,
though more straight percussive in the main. There are (light) industrial
like loops, hip hop, bongos, vaguely Kraftwerk like, rock almost, shift
from style to style, genreless almost. Once again though there are some
good ones, though a few a rather anonymous.
Teknozone, offers us 24 techno loops
of 130-170 BPM's, sounding pretty good, maybe just lacking definition
a little,they're all pretty busy. Maybe needing some careful EQ or layering
with sharper kick to bring a bit more cutting bite to them.
Moving on we have 4 tracks of Street
Grooves , all bar two and the fills at 130 BPM. Not what you might
expect these are "bucket band" sounds, featuring some more unusual
sounds, one presumes buckets feature a lot, with some light metallic sounding
percussive effects on top. Certainly a bit different, they're really very
effective.
Tabla's are the next offering, two
tracks of 90-100 BPM loops, that do rather sound alike, sort of thing
you could layer over another loop to add an extra dimension.
This is followed by more unusual effects
in the 3 World Grooves tracks, here we have a whole mixture of
"World" instruments, at BPM's of 90-130, we have Chatans, Ghat
Hams (new one to me), Talking Drums, Surdo's, Congas, Djembe's, Dumbeks
and Wood percussion. Once again there are some very good effects here,
I particularly liked the Surdo's could be right out of a film like Zulu.
Whilst never being able to compete with a specialist CD, if your looking
to add a more unusual percussive effect you should be able to find material
here to use.
The section round out with two tracks of
top loops , assorted, generally quite light in effect, loops of
cowbells, shakers, scrappers and the like designed either to add a light
percussive effect or layer with another loop to add an extra dimension.

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