Bandmate Loops
The Hybrid Aggression Loop Library

by Michael Potvin

The stack of sample library DVDs had been floating around for a couple months and I hadn’t taken one look at them. I had lent them to just about everyone and their brother who I thought might get some use out of them, each time hoping that someone would come back with some feedback for this review. No one said a thing. In fact, I don’t think anyone even did more than load them onto their computers. Does that mean the discs are crap and I’m gonna spend the rest of this column dissing them? Nope. It just means that I had to check them out for myself.

Many of the discs are filled with loops of instruments doing their thing, and usually there were four to eight loops for each groove, which you could play like a DJ in case coming up with your own songs is not really your thing. If you happen to get your hands on these and do know how to make music, you could chop these up just like you’d do with your mom’s record collection that you stole when you left the house.

One disc that is probably useful to many musicians and producers is the “Hybrid Aggression” disc of MPC grooves. This DVD is filled with about 200 drum loops. If you play with both a laptop and a live drummer, as I often do, these kind of loops are nice. You can easily load them into any program and start playing along to the loops and building your own songs over them. They really come to life when loaded into Reason’s Dr. REX Loop Player. Not only can the good doctor play the loops as-is, but it begs you to chop-n-screw. The loops come with the “Chop” points already defined when you load them into Reason. This is where you can save a lot of time versus using mom’s records, and get straight to making some pretty cool stuff.

If you are looking for multisampled gigasamples or anything for your hardware sampler, look elsewhere — these discs are made for chopping on a computer, not mapping to your midi controller like it’s 1988. If you are looking for beats and other random stuff you can freak for hours on your computer, definitely give these a shot.

www.bandmateloops.com

Michael Potvin is one of the gurus of Boston electronic music. Handling synth and programming duties in The Campaign for Real Time and Fantasy Mirrors (ex-Casette), Thunderdome, Potvin also serves as a figurehead of the Compound 440 dance/rock collective. We passed along the latest sample library DVDs from Bandmates - including SteelCore nu-metal drum loops and Deep Frets acoustic guitar loops - to see what he’d go for. Potvin tried to pass off the job to several friends and cronies (as previously reported in Performer, the Compound 440 crowd is a incestuous bunch), but surprise — tricking other musicians to help write reviews isn’t at easy at it seems.

myspace.com/potvin