Two sample packs for review here, from US-based company Peace Love Productions.   Like every other sample company, they're giving away loads of free samples on their website  - go and check it out.  I swear that if you just trawled round enough sample CD companies, you could fill your boots with free samples.  A bit like if you trawled round enough blogs, you'd never need to buy any more music.  Hmm.

The first is Afro-Cuban Rhythms.  This really does do exactly what it says on the tin - it's strictly percussive, and based firmly around 80 - 120BPM  Latin American sounds (although there is a disco section in there too).  Each style of beat comes with several variations of conga, kit, timbale, guiro loops and so on, with a few fully mixed beat loops, and a directory of one-shot hits too.  Spread over about 300 loops, this collection was played by some professional Latin percussionists, and recorded (from what I can tell) on some fairly nice gear - the kits in particular sound great.  I'm a bit of a sucker for a good snare sound, and there are plenty in here.   If I had a complaint - well, I do have a complaint, and then another one after that - it would be that a lot of the loops are really only slightly different;  two conga loops with different accenting for instance.  That's not to say that they're all the same of course, there's still a good amount of variety.  The other complaint would be that the core palette of sounds seems to be fairly small - we're talking about different styles played on the same instruments, if you see what I mean.  I'd have really liked to have heard some more different sounding kits in here.  

All that said though, the kits and sounds are really nice.  Even if you're not really into Afro Cuban rhythms, there are some crisp acoustic kits here that are worth your attention anyway.  It's a fairly niche product, but then the price is about 18 quid by my reckoning (30 dollars) which makes it worth checking out.

The second one is Jazzy House Loops.  This pack is, funnily enough, based around the jazzy, funky, lighter house end of things, and comes with over 460 loops, as well as some drum oneshots.  The drum loops come in various flavours - there are full beats, grooves with no kick, conga and percussion loops, all at about 120BPM.  I'd say that again, the conga and percussion loops sound really good, and the kicks are solid enough, everything swings nicely.  Some of the loops, though, sound as though they would be more at home on a tech-house pack - there's a lot of slightly techy sounding, highpassed stuff in there.  Nothing wrong with that per se, but in a jazzy house pack I'd have expected a few more Derrick Carter-esque chunky shaker loops and so on.  Moving on, there are the usual collections of bass sounds, FX, a few pad sounds - these are all good, although they didn't really grab the attention - but the highlight of the collection is, if you ask me, the keys sections.  They've been played by pianist John Hobart and are really spot on - stylistically, they'll fit right into any deep house or Hed Kandi-ish funky stuff, well played, sound good, from organs to pianos and Rhodeses (er, can you pluralise Rhodes?) and there's loads of them - 166 cut-up little licks and riffs, and then another 20 or so long solos.  I'd say this pack works a bit better than the one above - it provides a full overview of the sound, and although not perfect, I think the wealth of keys loops more than makes up for the faults.  It's the same price too.  Recommended.

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i.d.