SOUND QUALITY: 4 stars

SELECTION: 4 stars

BANG FOR THE BUCK: 4 stars



"A very evocative resource for the sampler owner who's in the mood for a quick trip to India. " Your grooves never need to be boring again," according to ER The Lion's share of this crisply recorded disc is devoted to 4/4 rhythm loops and tabla and / or related percussion instruments. Each track contains from four to 19 loops, breaks and single hits that are related by tempo or instruments used. The stereo imaging is very clear and characteristic pitch, blends, slaps, and finger rolls abound. " Wonderfully expressive and expertly played," commented our resident percussionist (GR). Also getting a workout on a few tracks are finger cymbals, rattles, clay pot, a one-stringed zither, and something that sounds rather like a timbale. Toward the latter part of the CD, there's a selection of hybrid loops that combine Indian percussion with TR-808, and some TR-808 patterns that are more or less in an Indian rhythmic style. Track 40, a set of eight phrases sung by female vocalist, has a lovely casual air. And who could resist a little kid saying, "Now the tablas"? The final track, a full-code test zone at 1kHz is a thoughtful touch. What's cool is that the accents in the loops don't always fall where a funk-based musician would expect them to. They open up a whole new rhythmic dimension. "I'd love to layer one of these tabla loops with a rippin' rock groove," GR commented. "I want this disc in my collection." No more boring grooves," ER concurred. Almost without exception, the rhythms are pre-looped as one or two bars of 4/4. We'd rather have heard the percussionist (s) play four bars straight through; it would give the user twice as much material in a single CD, and would also preserve more of the interesting nuances of live performance. The non-looped breaks are also given twice, in this case with a silent gap between the two identical samples, which makes it easier to arm your sampler for recording. The liner notes suggest that the disc is made up for the most part of material that was collected using an Akai S1000 and a Kurzweil K2000, which accounts for the fact that the samples are already truncated and looped. The single notes on santoor and baja are a joke: already looped (very badly) in a sampler before being recorded onto the CD. In a few cases awful thumping artifacts are actually embedded in the tone. Hoggie & The Turbinator (the developers of this project) must have dipped pretty deep into the vaults for this stuff; frankly, we doubt whether many sampler owners will be that hard up for hanks and twangs. By focusing a little more narrowly than "world" percussion collections that try to cram the whole globe onto one disc, Vindaloops is able to provide a lot more variety for anybody who is into this particular ethnic vibe or who actually plays bhangra music, for that matter. Considering that many of the tracks have a dozen or more samples to work from, all recorded at the same tempo and with the same drums, player, and milking, you should be able to assemble a rhythm track that has some stylin' breaks"