Inspiration Sounds recently released Electro Grime, a sample library featuring loops and sounds suitable for Dirty Electro House and Minimal House.

Dirty Electro House? Wikipedia says about Electro House:

Stylistically, it combines the four to the floor beats commonly found in House music with harmonically rich analogue basslines, abrasive high-pitched leads and the occasional piano or string riff. The tempo of electro house ranges approximately from 120 to 130 bpm. Dirty house is a derivative of electro, which is often much more commercial in its appeal and in general features more vocals.

Electro Grime seems to fit the above description with its 128bpm loops, 4/4 beats and analogue basslines. You’re going to have to come up with some vocals yourself though, as Electro Grime doesn’t have any (which is a good thing IMHO).

Browsing through the content you’ll find both one-shots and loops. The One-Shots include various synth, bass, drum and fx samples, while the loops folder is divided into drum loops, bass loops, synth & fx loops, and musical loops.

The musical loops include part mixes. Inspiration Sounds explains:

The idea being that novice producers can build up a track extremely easily with very little knowledge of electro construction.

Hmm… these don’t seem very useful to me, so I guess I’m not a novice producer! They are however a good indication of what Electro Grime sounds like, as you can hear in this demo mp3.

Electro Grime includes 2 types of drum loops, “Tops & Bottoms”. Tops feature hi-hats, snares and percussion in the middle to high frequency range. If you’re familiar with the term “no-kick” you’ll know what I’m talking about. Kicks and other low frequency sounds can be found in the Bottoms section. This is useful when you’re going to mix these loops with your own beats & percussion.

The 570MB library includes the following formats:

  • ACIDized WAV (key, beats and loop/one-shot attributes included)
  • Apple Loops (key, beats, genre, tempo & loop/one-shot attributes included)
  • REX2 (manually adjusted to pick out relevant notes/beats)
  • WAV (ideal for all hardware & software samplers & certain keyboards)

So what do I think?

Although I quite like Electro music, the harsh bass and synth sounds of Dirty Electro House music don’t appeal to me.

Having said that, Electro Grime delivers exactly the right sounds for this particular genre. Harsh, abrasive lead and bass sounds and fairly basic but solid 4/4 beats. The tops/bottoms separation of drum loops is a nice touch.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time creating Electro House tracks from scratch, this library might be the ticket. There are plenty of samples in the one-shot samples section as well, so you can still construct your own melodies and beats.

Electro Grime is available for instant download for £29.95 GBP / 39.95 EUR / $49.95 USD.

More information: Inspiration Sounds