Akai EWI 4000m Electric Wind Instrument Akai EWI 4000m Electric ...

ing of understated mystery, dread, or power
than pure chainsaw mayhem. Many kits
throw in surprising elements such as African
chants, Middle Eastern percussion, Far Eastern
strings, military snares and toms, ambient
hits, and a lot of bandpass-filtered beats.
The only thing I can hold against this collection
is a lack of variation, as most components
are only presented in one version. As a
Mahadhi: African Rhythms
$99.95
Big Fish Audio
(www.bigfishaudio.com)
platform: 16-bit 44.1 kHz
AIFF/Apple Loops, WAV, & REX2
files
license: May be used in the
licensee’s own “derivative” live
performances or recorded
compositions, but not in a sample
library.
result, quite often you will need to create
movement by switching elements on and off,
rather than being able to pull up evolutions
of the existing parts. Many who create music
in this style are already used to working this
way. For those outside of this genre looking
for additional spices and flavors, I think you’ll
find a surprising number of useful layers and
elements to include in your own work. VI
Let’s set the record straight from the
start: This is not a pristine set of carefully
recorded solos and grooves performed
in isolation to a click track by wellpaid
session musicians in high-end studios,
preserved in 24-bit 96 kHz fidelity. The vast
majority of the loops were recorded in mono,
close-miked with varying degrees of fidelity in
live ensemble performance situations, complete
with some mic bleed and the occasional
grunt.
And you know something? It’s great. My
left brain says it shouldn’t be, while my right
brain says shut up and dance.
All loops are available in AIFF, WAV, and
REX2 formats; I tested the AIFF versions,
which weigh in at just over a gig. There are
27 construction kit folders labeled by tempo.
These include from five to eleven subfolders
that break out each song by instruments, plus
a minute-plus 24-bit stereo demo that illustrates
various combination of instruments.
(Don’t be fooled, though, as most components
are 16-bit mono.)
Each instrument folder contains anywhere
from one to 47 mostly 2-bar looped phrases
in 4/4, tallying up to over 1800 loops total.
With the exception of the occasional kalimba
folder, you get just the percussive instruments,
although you can hear through the
mic bleed that a full ensemble including
singers was actually performing at the time
these were recorded.
As noted, sound quality varies: the conga
and djembe have particularly nice transients,
plus the bembe and ogenne have appropriately
present rattles and buzzes, but the shakers
and kalimba suffer from exaggerated
VI review
Big Fish Mahadhi: African Rhythms
loop library
proximity effect by being miked too closely,
while the talking drum sounds a bit muffled.
This can make you cringe while listening to
loops in isolation, but it becomes far less of
an issue when mixed into a track.
Someone used to a steady diet of Western
grooves might listen to real African rhythms
and hear just a cacophony of competing
instruments, assuming there’s no way that the
timing is tight or would line up against a
steady Western pulse—hey, even I did at first.
In reality, all those mad percussionists are
cleverly hitting in-between beats and placing
emphasis on notes other than The One.
As a result, these loops work surprisingly
well as layers mixed in with straight-ahead
Western drum kit grooves, as they hit the
spaces in-between, rather than fighting over
the accents. Although the occasional groove
needs some timing correction to bring it back
to a metronomic beat, the vast majority are
actually in the pocket.
Another nice thing is that most of the
loops are closer to backing grooves with variations
rather than solos, again making them
work well as layers supporting other rhythms.
Stripped of their melodic instruments, the
“songs” come across more as moods or flavors,
also resulting in them being more flexible
than anticipated.
Honestly, my initial impression of this
library was not good, but now I expect to use
it quite a bit for texture and spice. While
recording live like this might have caused the
fidelity to suffer, the flip side is that the performances
are exuberant, and authentic emotion
is all too hard to find when it comes to
samples. VI
VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS 53