Music Tech Review: Complextro
Since our review of Loopmasters' excellent French Electro House pack back in Issue 99, producer Utku.S has gone on to start his own sample label, Freaky Loops, which focuses on providing upfront electronic sounds. The first release is called Complextro, so named after the schizophrenic new genre made famous by the likes of Deadmau5 and Skrillex, which combines elements of heavy dubstep, glitch and electro house styles.
The pack contains 682MB of 24-bit loops in WAV format, with the majority at 128bpm and a few at 130bpm. You'll find bass, drums, top-loops, music loops and combi loops, seven construction kits and several FX and synth multisamples. As with the French Electro House pack, the production is aggressive and upfront, with pumping synth lines and resonant analogue bass lines processed through an array of different distortions. Although you won't find a great deal of variety, the quality remains high throughout, with a raw finish gracing most bass and synth loops. We found it easy to create a number of different Complextro bass line riffs by chopping and changing the different four-bar loops on offer.
The drums follow a similar route and range from fuller beats with fast hi-hat shuffles to more stripped back but driving kick and snare grooves. Ideally, we would have liked to have each beat presented as its component parts so we could lay them out in our arrangement, but the drum top loops go some way to rectifying this.
Although the construction kits are a useful addition, it would have been nice to have more, and the combi loops may be a little too full-sounding for some. Finally, there's a small collection of synth FX and a slightly disappointing four multisampled instruments.
If you're after dance floor destroying bass synth loops you're in the right place as this is Utku.S' forte. Although the pack could have been made a little more flexible with more riff variations, you'll find a decent amount of chunky beats, nice arps and FX.
