Freak Beats is aimed at the lower BPM musical spectrum, and covers a range of BPM's from 70 up to a modest 105 in jumps of 5. There are 530 distinct loops, together with 50 scratch samples at the end. Most of the samples are towards the upper margin of this band, no less than 430 of them have BPM's in the 90-105 range, so if your into the more manic styles or 120 BPM is slow to you then this isn't going to be your sort of sample CD.

The loops range from straight sounding live kits, through to the most esoteric of processed percussion, generally the sounds are straight percussive, thought here and there a few bass elements and blips, fills, weird noises and scratches feature. Quite a range of processing effects have been applied as well, though not as extreme as some, these range from vinyl scratch type effects, compression, distortion, EQ and stereo effects. Indeed there are quite a few very effective uses of the stereo spectrum, without going too extreme.

The collection as a whole give the impression of being quite "light" and open sounding. The percussive effects are not huge, though there are some more powerful ones mixed in. Neither is the entire sound stage used up, allowing the loops to fit into a mix, without swamping it, allowing space for other sounds to work with them.

The sound used vary greatly, there are a fair number of loops based around crunchy kick and snare sounds, others are almost Kraftwerk like in their nature, and most points in-between, though on the whole there are fairly sensible, without drifting off in to extremes. I don't think I can recall one loop, where I thought, "well what could I actually add to that".

The loops are presented in a short two bar repeated pattern, there are a few where there are a couple of variations of a loop presented but the vast majority are just singular. The short presentation as you would think allows for little if any variation or evolution of the loops. So to take one of these loops and construct a track around will need a little work if one wants to produce some fills and crossovers. If there was ever a loop collection that would benefit from the use of Steinbergs Recycle! then this may well be it.