G-Force
Apr 1, 2001 12:00 PM, James Rotondi
For my money, the Gretsch drum kit was the drum sound of the ’70s. Woody, natural, and crisp, it turned up in everything from Paul Simon to Philly Soul to the Knack. Coupled with a Ludwig Black Beauty snare, a Gretsch kit delivered the maximum marriage of jazz-funk thwack, R&B thump, and rock power. That's exactly the recipe cooked up by G-Force in Acoustic Swing and Shuffle Grooves (WAV, AIFF, MIDI, and SoundFont II, $59), a smart set of loops, fills, and construction kits played by drummer Shane Meehan on a vintage ’70s Gretsch kit.
All of the parts are offered as AIFF, WAV, and MIDI files for technical flexibility, but a standard CD player won't be able to read them as straight audio. I auditioned the material by importing WAV files into my Samples window in BitHeadz's Phrazer program; you can also use an audio player such as QuickTime. The Drum Kits — collections of single hits of toms, snares, cymbals, and other sounds — come in Creative Labs' SoundFont II format.
The drum sounds are hi-fi and clean, with a nice room ambience but no added reverb and little if any compression. The producers recorded Meehan's hits and grooves on a prized Helios desk once used by Roxy Music, Bob Marley, and Paul Weller, and they turned to a Roland V-Drum kit to record the MIDI files. The collection offers a nice cross-section of styles and beats — ’70s shuffle grooves, 6/4 blues-ballad grooves, slow R&B beats, Philly soul patterns, funk backbeats, Bernard Purdie — style shuffles, and glam-rock rave-ups — but the accent is on variation, not variety.
In other words, each subset of styles basically repeats a very similar groove with some minor tweaks: bass drum out, extra hi-hat syncopation, adding a ride cymbal, and so forth. That could be considered either good or bad because of how easy it is to time-stretch tempos, in MIDI or with today's audio programs like ReCycle, Acid, and Phrazer — you certainly have the option of transfiguring these beats in many different ways. However, you're also getting only a proscribed number of feels. As beautifully recorded and sweet as these samples are, I'd like to hear even more of them, with more adventurous journeys into the heart of soul and funk. For the moment, though, Acoustic Swing and Shuffle Grooves provides plenty of rare grooves to chew on and a variety of audio formats to suit your ever-evolving needs.
Overall Rating (out of 5): 3.5
G-Force, dist. by Q Up Arts; tel. (800) 454-4563; e-mail info@quparts.com;
Web www.quparts.com
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