MINIREVIEW: BETA MONKEY DRUM WERKS V5

Oct 19, 2005 4:56 PM, By Jason Scott Alexander

This independent sample shop has been churning out slammin’ acoustic-drum-groove discs at near-breakneck speed for more than two years. Specializing in 100 percent acoustic material, Beta Monkey’s economy-priced libraries, to date, have covered everything from double-bass hard rock and metal to country, blues, pop and hip-hop. In Drum Werks V5, the skilled BM team sets its sights squarely on sizzling, energy-soaked rock, alt- and power-pop grooves presented in a toolbox manner. What you get are more than 570 MB of 16-bit WAV loops (738 in all)—including beats, fills, intros, endings, hi-hat and ride cymbal patterns, and one-shots—arranged into tempo-based folders. Confidently casual and polished-feeling throughout, these folders span 12 different groove genres, from 75 bpm classic rock to straight and occasionally swung 100 to 50 bpm–range rock and pop to straight and shuffled 180 bpm blister grooves. What’s more, a folder containing a copious amount of multivelocity single hits awaits assembly into a complete drum kit for augmenting the provided grooves or rolling your own.

The loops come just as I like them, intimately raw and underprocessed, preferring to leave the treatment to mixdown. The really cool thing about this disc is that every groove, fill and hit is sonically matched, pristinely recorded off the same kit and taken from the same recording session. This makes for a cohesive library of uniform ambience front to back, where you can mix and match elements from not only within a single folder but also across the entire disc. The smart inclusion of cymbal swells, tom variants and several intricately played hi-hat and ride cymbal patterns (with and without snare backbeats) for each groove genre makes creating a complex and dynamic-sounding arrangement possible. Whether building a contemporary pop track from scratch or looking for brilliant session drumming to remix, Drum Werks V5 is a go-to loop collection for ballsy, realistic results.

For more information about Beta Monkey, visit www.betamonkeymusic.com.

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