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

From the day they opened their doors in 1994, ILIO has been committed to producing useful, timeless and inspiring sample libraries for musicians. Tapping years of experience in sound design and electronic composition, their knowledge of the quality demands of today's music scene is the driving force behind every title they release.