- Following on from recent additions to the Loopmasters Artist series such as those from King Roc and Untold, it's time for the well-loved UK jock Steve Lawler to have a pop. The pack is entitled Dark Percussive House and Techno, and armed with some knowledge of his style you should be left in little doubt of what to expect: the focus is on tribal tech, with acoustically-inclined drum hits, swinging Latin grooves and oodles and oodles of percussion, drifting from the ethnic and flirting with more electro-tinged, idiosyncratic flavours. So the bass hits and kicks are generally smooth and fashioned to sit under your mix rather than dominate; the bass and synth loops are grooves rather than hooks that hold rhythm as their chief quality.
If you're knowingly nodding your head at this point, also remember that Lawler does explore weirder, more seedy areas, and this is catered for too. The SFX, although with a generally functional bent various flavours of white noise, for example, and lots of useful buildup sounds do have an edgy flavour to them. The vocal FX especially set a course directly for freakyville, although this folder is pretty much a one trick pony. Lots of the synths also get more synthetic, with some nice bright analogue sounds that would stand out well in a track.
So, the facts: there's almost a GB of 44.1kHz, 24-bit royalty free samples here, and a cursory glance over them will show the nice balance between quality and quantity. There's a range of synth and bass loops in different keys and drum loops in different styles ("jackin," "latin," "perc," etc). All of these are also included as .rex files. There's about 50-100 of each of these types of loop for each tempo (although I'm not convinced of the benefit of having separate types that are only 2 BPM apart), and it's a similarly abundant story for each of the types of drum hits, with, yes, loads more percussive hits than anything else. There's also decent amounts of SFX and vocal FX, but a few more synth and bass sounds would be nice.
If, like for me, the task of sorting your sample library out is about as appealing as sweat flavoured crisps, then you'll welcome the very simple, integrate-in-under-five-minutes nature of the folder hierarchy and there's patches for a range of soft samplers that include all the WAV one-shots anyway. There are no annoying construction packs, just good ol' fashioned, sensibly organised sounds and loops. The well chosen and concise nature of the selection (there's only nine ride sounds, for example) adds to the ease of use, while the bass and leads are (thankfully) left largely FX-free.
Overall, there's a solid feel to this collection. The rhythmic loops are superbly tough and funky and the sounds are warm and chunky throughout. It's obvious from the quality of the sounds, as well as their tightly compiled range and variety, that there's been considerable care put into Dark Percussive Really, it's difficult to criticise this at all; for what it aims to deliver, it pretty much hits the spot dead on.
Ratings /
Cost: 4/5
Versatility: 4/5
Sound: 4.5/5