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Stark
Raving Beats
Keyboard June 2003
Right from the opening tracks, the beats in this
collection are infectious. My head started nodding subconciously
to the rhythm. The material is tight but not perfectly precise -
and this is intentional. Drummer Chris O'Brien and the producers
deliberately avoided mega-quantizing, opting instead to leave a
touch of natural slop here and there. The loops sit well with rigidly
quantized MIDI tracks but at the same time add a little sweat and
greaze to the proceedings. Ernie Rideout concurred: "A lot
of these beats give you a deep pocket and some ear candy all in
one."
Interestingly, the collection makes substantial
use of the Korg Wavedrum, a physical-modeling percussion instrument
not often seen or heard. On Stark Raving Beats it's used
for tonally realistic but wildly pitch-bent congas, strange quasi-acoustic
taps and thumps, and acoustically impossible textures.
The use of Ilio/Spectrasonics' Groove Control
scheme extends the flexibility of this collection quite a bit, allowing
you to conscript the loops into duty they weren't necessarily conceived
for. For the uninitiated, Groove Control works with loops that have
been broken out into rhythmic slices and laid out across a number
of contiguous keys. Sound like ReCycle? It works in much the same
way, but it's already done for you, with Standard MIDI Files on
the data disc ready to load into your sequencer.
Adding further versatility is the fact that every
element of each loop is available as a seperate entity. Combined
with Groove Control, this gives you a huge bucketful of sonic Legos
to put together as you choose.
Groove Control was also employed to enhance the
separation of the drums in the breakout loops; in cases where, say,
the snare and another drum were hit at the same time, O'Brien and
crew have often substituted a clean snare hit. Ilio states that
this is the first time this degree of separation has been available
in a loop library.
All in all, this is a crackin' great library.
Sure, there's lots of acoustic drums-plus-enhancements matrial out
there, but this one's got a little something extra.
-Ken Hughes
REMIX March 2003
Modern beat-making has evolved from the art of
microphone placement to the
choice of preamp and compressor settings to the era of, “Which
VST plug-in
are you using, dude?” That said, Ilio Entertainments' Stark
Raving Beats
collection boasts a veritable sonic showcase full of pre-, post-
and
over-the-top production techniques applied to progressive, big-beat
and
jungle-influenced drum-set grooves. Although the gear list is provided
in
the liner notes, these grooves never stray from the point: beats.
Some
producers may hear too much slickness in these gleaming and glossy
beats,
but Chris O'Brien and his production crew have canned a true labor
of love
full of cinematic beatscapes and his own original bombastic slate
of
trip-hop rhythms. Stark Raving Beats is a study in hi-fi percussion
processing with 35 driving, multilayered kit and hand-percussion
rhythms
broken into 370 groove mixes for a hard drive full of layering options.
The
$199 version comes with Spectrasonics' infamous Groove Control data
files,
which allow you to align the original loop tempos (ranging from
105 to 170
bpm) to your track. Like a rave in another dimension, Stark Raving
Beats is
a true and defining original. -By Dave Hill Jr.
Sound on Sound Review
5 Stars
This new CD-ROM collection is a set of rhythmic loops based around
the live drumming of Chris O'Brien. His performances have been processed
and layered with hand percussion, Korg Wavedrum and effects to create
35 complete rhythmic arrangements. In terms of style, the collection's
title and the cover model's choice of spectacles give you a fairly
good indication of what's on offer — the emphasis is firmly
on high-energy four-four dance styles, with tempos nominally between
105 and 170bpm.
So, it's a bunch of construction-kit loops for dance music. So what?
Well, for a start, the copious use of live performances and real
percussion in these loops gives them much more groove than you'd
typically associate with a collection aimed at the dance market,
and the quality of the musicianship really brings the rhythms to
life — in fact, just the live drum performances on their own
provide a selection of usable breaks with real attitude. The electronic
sounds and effects are certainly wild enough for all but the starkest
of ravers, and the ambience of the acoustic drums helps mould all
the disparate electronic elements together into a cohesive sound.
Were that the end of the story, this would already be a good collection.
However, this title is also Groove Control activated, which means
that all the sampler programs can be accessed in sliced-up versions,
where each sonic layer is assigned to its own sampler program. Supplied
MIDI files trigger these programs from within your sequencer, with
the result that you can run the loops at almost any tempo and mix
the layers in any combination. This allows you to import only those
elements you want from each loop into your project, to sync them
up to the song's tempo, and to change the groove if necessary. And
if you're still not happy, then you can completely reprogram the
parts using the editing functions in your sequencer and sampler.
A bonus with Stark Raving Beats is the great care which has been
taken to make sure that the sounds are as easy as possible to find.
If you have a computer (PC or Mac), you can quickly audition WAV
files of any loop or element of a loop directly from one of the
discs, with a PDF file of the comprehensive documentation available
to check which CD-ROM volume you need to load. Not only are the
individual loop layers sorted according to the loop they're used
with, but also according to what instrument they use, so you can
easily check out all the hi-hat parts in the collection, for example.
If you have no computer, there are special sampler programs which
lay out the mixed loops, loop layers, and individual drum hits across
the keyboard for quick auditioning even within a hardware-only setup.
Overall, these are 35 top-notch construction kits, and they are
presented in such a flexible and user-friendly format that little
or no material is likely to sit around gathering dust — in
marked contrast to most dance loop collections I've seen. Furthermore,
given that there are so many acoustic percussion parts, and that
you can isolate and radically alter any loop layer, I can imagine
Stark Raving Beats being useful even well outside the musical genre
at which it is ostensibly aimed. An exemplary piece of work all
round. -Mike Senior
EQ Review Stark Raving Beats
has four CDs Featuring high-energy, funk/rock-style grooves based
on acoustic drums. Each groove comes in multiple formats: as mixed
WAV files for auditioning with "full mixes" (including percussion
and wild electronic effects) and "small mixes" (basic drum
parts); complete sampler setups with mixes and the individual track
loops on various keys; "Groove Control" versions of a complete
mix; and a Groove Control "elements" version. There are
also individual hits.
Groove Control uses the same concept as ReCycle: slice up the audio
into individual sounds, then trigger them with MIDI. You can speed
up and slow down the parts without changing pitch, because the slices
just move closer together or further apart. The "elements"
version is the most complex, as it contains all elements used to make
up the groove, with each in Groove Control format. All necessary MIDI
sequences for all Groove Control options are included.
This is confusing until you load a complete set of variations and
see the differences between them. Then it all makes sense: you can
mix and match grooves, parts of grooves, change temposits
all very flexible. If youre looking for hot grooves that you
can deconstruct and re-construct, this is a well-recorded, well-played,
versatile collection. Akai or Roland CD-ROM, $199; audio CD (no Groove
Control, of course) $99.
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