AMG
Jan 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Chris Gill
King Tone Grooves Maybe you've dreamed of hiring a drummer to record some personalized loops for you. But if you've looked into the situation, you probably realized that you'd have to (a) find a great drummer, (b) find a studio with a good-sounding room, and (c) pay a ton of money for the drummer and the studio. Of course, hundreds of sample CDs offer thousands of prerecorded drum loops, but many of these are a hodgepodge of disparate performances or stiff robo beats.
AMG's King Tone Grooves (two CDs - audio and WAV, $99.95) is the next best thing to hiring a professional drummer for an extended sampling session. Featuring more than 1,000 loops performed live in the studio by drummer Wayne Proctor, King Tone Grooves provides pristine, professionally recorded material with consistent performances and sound quality. Proctor delivers outstanding grooves that lean heavily toward funk and dance music, with a good dose of hard-hitting rock thrown in.
The loops on these discs have generic names like "groove," "dance," "go," and "fullout," as well as a few specific references such as "Beck," "Bonham," and "Keltner," but it's still relatively easy to zero in on an appropriate loop. You can apply the material to just about any style of rock- or funk-based music, including hip-hop, funky breaks, drum `n' bass, and so forth. But if your tastes lean more toward jazz or Latin styles, you won't find much relevant material here. In addition to straight-ahead patterns, the discs include a great assortment of fills and rolls for variety.
Although Proctor is a relatively unknown British drummer, he has an excellent feel and a delicious-sounding kit with a loose, floppy bass drum and a bright, high-pitched snare. The sound of Proctor's kit may vary slightly according to the type of grooves he's playing (for example, the tone on the "cool funk" loops is tight and small, while the "chemical" loops are appropriately huge and sustained), but it is consistent enough from pattern to pattern that you can mix and match loops without noticeable disparity. The drum kit is recorded either dry or with just the right touch of room reverb, providing a blank canvas for you to apply your own processing touches. Some of the loops make effective use of tape compression and overdrive for that authentic analog sound.
The only problem with this collection is that some of the loops are too obviously inspired by identifiable sources. If you're looking for a completely original sound, King Tone Grooves may not be the best place to start - or you should at least be prepared to do quite a bit of editing on your own. Nonetheless, Proctor is an excellent drummer in his own right, with a great sound. All 73 minutes of material sound as though they were painstakingly produced over a single long session, one that would cost the average Joe or Jane several thousand dollars to duplicate.
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