Review: Loopmasters Deep, Tech & Minimal House + Sample Magic Minimal Techno
Sample libraries geared towards the minimal techno genre seem quite popular lately. Two recently released titles covering this genre are Loopmasters Deep, Tech & Minimal House, and Sample Magic’s Minimal Techno.
I’m not terribly familiar with all these subgenres of house/techno music, so I took these libraries for a spin to see what they are all about.
First some details on the libraries.
Deep, Tech & Minimal House offers some 1.2GB original content, recorded and produced by house producer Andy Lee of Barcoda, while Minimal Techno is produced by Sample Magic’s very own Shahrooz Raoofi (who also did Loopmasters titles like Deep Trance & Techno).
Both libraries include tons of acidized wav files, Apple Loops, REX2 files and soft sampler patches. Deep, Tech & Minimal House also includes 10 additional Combinator patches in the ReFill version, and 73 sampler patches in the Ableton Live Pack (both available on the DVD).
House, techno, minimal… huh?
Minimal Techno includes 100s of sub-heavy big room belters and tweeter freakin’ tops, while Deep, Tech, & Minimal House features glitched out and tweaked up loops, and blissed out and jacked up sequences and chord patterns.
Reading the product descriptions might leave you scratching your head, wondering what are we talking about here?!
Basically, both libraries include all the loops, samples and patches you need to construct some slamming tracks. Drums, bass, melodic loops… it’s all there.
A picture paints a thousand words, so let’s hear it!
More mp3 demos are available on the product pages.
Loopmasters Deep, Tech, & Minimal House is available on DVD for £39.95 GBP (various download options are available as well, starting at £29.95 GBP), while Sample Magic Minimal Techno is available on a DVD/CD multipack for £58.67 GBP (also available as a download for £49.95 GBP).
So what do I think?
These sample libraries are pretty slick. Both titles include tons of quality loops and sounds and it’s a breeze to put some great sounding tracks together. And that’s perhaps the only thing I personally don’t like too much.
It’s interesting that the Sample Magic philosophy on the about us page says:
We DON’T: Sell “join the dots” style construction kits. C’mon, where’s the fun in that?!
Yet, that’s exactly how I feel about both these libraries. We are talking about loop libraries though, and I feel that a coherent loop library would be pretty much automatically be some sort of a construction kit.
Here’s what I did. I opened Ableton Live in the session screen and dropped loops from each category in different channels. Then I just started clicking around combining the various elements and before I knew it I felt like I was DJ’ing someone else’s music. Most loops work so well together that you can create full tracks in minutes. Some loops are actually complete pieces already!
Of course you can also just use a couple of these loops, cut them up, add some of the single shot sounds, or even use the instrument patches and your own samples and instruments to create melodies.
I really dig the sound quality of both titles, punchy & fresh. To me the Minimal Techno library seems to have more “edgy” sounds, which I like, but if you’re looking for loops in this genre you can’t go wrong with either title.
More information: Loopmasters / Sample Magic
