Sampling Sound System Popped Vol.1 Drum Tools CDDA WAV AiFF

RAR|465MB
Another volume in the Sound Sampling System from Sounds Good, Popped is part of the 'Drum Tools' section of the library. It basically consists of two drummers (Mats Persson and Christer Jansson) performing a series of loops, fills and individual single samples on a number of standard studio drum kits. As the title suggests, these loops have a strong pop bias -- as is freely admitted in the track titles, which name the bands or artists who 'inspired' the loops: Peter Gabriel, Tom Petty, The Who, XTC, Cream, The Small Faces, Blur and New Order among them. The audio section of the CD times out at just over 24 minutes and the drum loops are categorised according to tempo and stylistic content; as usual, the tempos go up 10bpm at a time, in this volume from 80bpm up as high as 150. This gives library owners a huge degree of flexibility when it comes to interchanging sampled loops and grooves between discs, and will also prove a big help to anyone without the ability to perform complex time-stretching or compression functions within their sampler.

The emphasis seems to be on more raw-sounding indie pop styles as opposed to hipper or more polished drumming. This effect works extremely well for a good number of the loops, but occasionally the 'rough and ready' approach gives the impression that the recording quality is not as good as it might be. There's a good range of snare and bass drum sounds, and the loops are faithful in tempo and style to the classic pop songs they have their roots in, but as the disc progresses to individual drum samples, there's more than just a hint of grottiness to a good number of the sounds.

As an introduction to the world of drum-sample CDs, Popped really does quite well: the flexibility of the tempo structures and the good number of fills and loops more than make up for the slightly disappointing single-hit samples -- and, of course, the fact that all the samples have been chopped up and are ready to load into your computer as WAV or AIFF files will be a great help to many users. The playing is of a suitably high quality, the layout is logical, and if you're looking for some solid beats with a rich 'indie' feel to them, Popped will satisfy most samplists for a short while, if not longer.