４つ星

「スウィング・ビート、ヒップホップ、モダンR&Bなど、色んなR&Bスタイルが幅広くカバーされた、使えるビーツ満載のライブラリー。完璧にプログラムされたクリアな音質のドラム・ループ・・・実際、ヒット・レコードを生み出す為の秘密兵器がここにあると言っても過言じゃない！」 4 Stars

Programming a drum part quite often causes all sorts of headaches. I remember when working with a rapper once, I spent about three hours programming and tweaking a rhythm so that the timing was absolutely spot-on and it sounded really hip and fashionable for the time, particularly the snare pattern. Then we spent three-quarters of an hour failing to get the bass part right. Try as we might, we couldn't get it to work, and then, at the end of this fruitless exercise, the rapper turned to me and said "yeah, well, the snare pattern is out of date". After 45 minutes! How fast modern music fashions change.



If only I'd had a copy of this excellent e-lab CD at the time - it's packed full of beats and percussion sounds. Of course, it probably willdate (although it'll take a lot longer than three-quarters of an hour to be yesterday's news), but then, what goes around comes around; trends seem to fall out of favour and then come back into fashion on a monthly basis these days. What makes this a really worthwhile purchase (apart from the fact that it has what seems like every conceivable kick/snare combination in modern music - well, a couple of hundred different ones anyway) is that it serves as an excellent library of easy-to-apply beats covering many styles, including swingbeat, hip-hop and modern R&B.



There are no hidden surprises on this disc; just perfectly programmed, sonically clear drum loops. They will work perfectly as they are, but the superb quality means you could doctor them with absurd amounts of compression, time-stretching, overdrive and any other flavour of studio trickery if you wish.



The tempos range predominantly from 70 to 106bpm, but there are a couple of slower loops as well. It's just a shame the producers at e-lab didn't keep the tempos grouped together, instead of dotting them across the 97 tracks in a random order (there are 99 tracks on the disc in total, but track one is "a bunch of breaks" and track 99 is a test tone at 1kHz, 0dB).



All in all, e-lab have compiled this CD beautifully - it's immensely (and instantaneously) usable. The track listing on the sleeve tells you everything you need to know: it gives (in this order) the track number, name, tempo (in bpm), the number of loop variations, how many bars the pattern lasts, the number of isolated sounds included after the main pattern (these, incidentally, are played in time, which is a very neat touch), and any additional loops that have been included. Every track has been programmed from scratch using mainly drum machines, a few live instruments and the occasional sampled beat. All the rhythmic sounds you could possibly want for modern dance-based tunes are here, clean as a whistle. In fact, I'd go as far as to say there's enough ammunition here for a whole swathe of hit records.