Product Spotlight: Sample Magic Nu-Rave sample library

Product Spotlight: Sample Magic Nu-Rave sample library

15 August, 2008 | 12.00PM

• Section: Music News Topics: Technology
• Written by: francispreve

Few soundware companies have achieved the level of consistent quality that Sharooz Raoofi’s Sample Magic delivers.

An accomplished electro and tech producer in his own right, Sharooz’s Beatport releases clearly demonstrate his skill and commitment to real-world production values, not cheesy ‘me-too’ knockoffs.

We loved Sample Magic’s Minimal and Tech House collection earlier this year, so their latest offering – Nu-Rave – naturally piqued our interest.

After spending a few evenings with Nu-Rave, here’s what we found.

Technical specification

As with Sample Magic’s other libraries, the 2.7 GB of data on Nu-Rave covers nearly every viable format, including Native Instrument’s Kontakt, Reason NNXT, Steinberg’s Halion, Stylus RMX, Logic’s EXS24, as well as common loop formats like WAV, AppleLoop and even REX.

The sampler-based data offers a lot of flexibility in terms of editing, allowing producers to restructure the content via standard sequencing tools.

For users who want to just dive right in, the audio loops are neatly organized by instrument type and tempo.

The loop types include bass, combi (mixed music), drum, music only, synth parts, tops/glitch, and vox (vocal) at three tempos - 120, 125 and 130 - which pretty much cover the usable spectrum for the Nu-Rave/Disco genre.

Better still, musical key information is included in each loop’s filename, which is wonderfully handy for producers with a bit of training under their belt.

Usability

The electro uprising of the past few years has seeped into pretty much every modern club genre – tech house is techier, progressive is funkier, techno grooves harder, even trance has developed a bit of a wiggle – so it’s not really a surprise that electro was destined to cross-pollinate with the alt-electronic scene at some point.

The result of all this genre-melding can even be found on Beatport itself, as astute readers may have already noticed the recent addition of the Indie Dance / Nu Disco category.

Pardon the pun, but Sample Magic really didn’t miss a beat when they created the Nu-Rave collection.

Rather than get all wild with the ephemeral adjectives, we’ll just rattle off a short list of artists whose styles are represented in this library: Justice, MSTRKRFT, Simian Mobile Disco, Chromeo, Switch, Martin Solveig, SebastiAn, Moulinex, etc… Well, you get the picture.

Adding Thomas Bangalter and Fred Falke to that list probably would have been redundant since all of the above artists owe at least a nod to those French scalliwags who kind of kicked this whole thing off back in the 90s, but we digress.

Now that the comparisons are out of the way, let’s talk quality.

Put simply, when it comes to the Nu-Rave / Nu Disco genre, this library rocks in ways that other developers can only dream of. Period.

Every nuance, every groove is utterly heartfelt and authentic, with production quality that is right up there with any track currently on the Beatport Nu Disco charts.

If it sounds like we’re gushing, that’s because we are.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a little room for improvement,

If we could make one tiny request of Sample Magic for their next batch of releases, it would be to break out the drum loops into their individual components: kick loop, snare loop, hat loop, etc, as this would make it a breeze to mix and match components to customize the groove for intros, buildups, breakdowns and so on.

But that’s about the only negative thing we can come up with for this library.

Now, if only Sharooz would start making tracks like these for proper commercial release.

Seriously.

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