Maketunes.com review DnB Producer
Drum and Bass has been a favorite genre of mine for many years now, as music to dance to, listen to - and produce of course.
As anyone who's familiar with the genre will know, it's a type of music which is perhaps one of the best suited to looping and frenetic sampling - something a lot Loop CD producers have caught onto, but sadly few seem to have mastered. Too often the loops on drum n bass sample CDs are generic, all to familiar sounds, and tired old breakbeats.
I'm pleased to say that I found Loopmasters Drum & Bass Producer CD interesting, varied, and extremely easy to work with.
Included on the loops CD is over 670MB of high quality WAV loops along with associated REX2 files and NNXT multisampled instruments for Reason users.
First off, I copied the Loop CDs files to my harddrive, and tried importing a wide range of them into Sonic Foundry ACID - one of my tried and true methods of loop based music production.
Within 10 minutes I had my first loopmasters track booming with rolling basslines, phat sub cuts, and frantic breakbeats stabbing through nicely layered two step beats. I added some looped atmospherics providing an eerie background soundscape, and a few one shot synth sounds cutting through the mix for some variety.
My first impressions, from so easily creating the beginnings of a track which I would be happy to find playing in a dnb club, were that with virtually no application of DirectX FX or VST plugins, I was already well on the way.
With more time spent on creating tracks using this loops cd, combined with the careful use of audio FX filters - and final mastering of course - it's my firm belief that it's entirely possible to produce some very phat professional tracks using nothing but this Loops CD as their basis.
As with anything, music production using loop CDs is really only limited by the producers imagination. Some drum and bass producers may choose to simply layer loops and do very little creative "slicing and dicing" with the samples, and still end up with a good sound.
I prefer to spend more time with individual sections of a loop based track - cutting loops, moving and tweaking looped segments, and generally find that I end up with something that sounds entirely unique - "my sound", despite the content originating from a Loops CD.
I would encourage any drum n bass producer to check out the Loopmasters Drum & Bass Producer loops CD - well worth while.
