Wood67


The one other thing I would like though would be a lot more vocal samples.  I am not allowed to sing for fear of causing permanent damage to anyone who hears it so spend quite a bit of time trawling for A Capella files which I can cut up.

Yes to vocal samples! Even if it's just a few "oo's" and "ah's" to add texture to an otherwise instrumental track. Another thing I'd like to see, but you never do, is acoustic guitar. Would it kill them to piece together some tasty strumming or fingerpicking loops? I'm not just having a go at the creators of this particular content....look at packages like NI's Komplete Ultimate too. They'll find the space for African drums and Balinese percussion instruments, but nothing in the way of acoustic or electric guitar licks which are REALLY going to be useful to a producer (unless you count their "Scarbee funk guitar"  which isn't really that hot). 

DimPro has a couple of patches of 'Oohs' and 'Aahs' and the odd 'Oh Baby'.  I use them every now and then but they are still a bit limiting.  Finding entire A Capella(e) is a real treat, especially if you have no idea of the original key or tempo.  It's amazing how sometimes you can drop a phrase into an existing progression and find it just works.

I'm sure there used to be a guitar patch with strums and licks, but having a scroll through last night I couldn't find them in the newly installed X2 version.  I think my install is knackered anyway as none of the vintage synth patches had the underlying samples installed.  That will be the 3rd time round I've installed DimPro since X2 went on...

I like samples and loops for spice. The hardest thing about loops is finding something that works.
The Cakewalk freebie thing reminds me of stuff I had back in the 90s.

timidi


I like samples and loops for ****e. The hardest thing about loops is finding something that works.
The Cakewalk freebie thing reminds me of stuff I had back in the 90s.

LOL - that's what I was going to say too. Going through the loops reminded me of back when I was sequencing on my Amiga back in the early 90's. People would pass around floppy discs full of 8-bit techno samples and you'd sift through them one by one thinking "no....no....no....no....horrible...no...horrible..."


Back in those days, a lot of the harmony peculiar to techno music came about from people using synth chord samples and just playing them faster or slower to get different pitches. So you'd have the same min7 or maj7 chord moved up and down in parallel to make riffs, which at the time sounded "jazzy" but got old pretty quickly. I was amused to see that this kind of harmony is still apparent in some of these loops. 

 Some songs I play and never use any loops at all and others I use loops on. The metadata or finding the right catagories can sometimes waste a lot of time. There are some categories under specialty titles like loopmasters but by and large the loop classifications are  splintered. It would be nice if all of the drums were simply under a title called drums,no matter who made the loops. Same for bass, synth and so forth.

 The loops themselves do seem centric to that crowd but I have found some useful loops in there I could use. The beatz crowd has mostly built a genre on only loops so I guess it makes sense that there would be more loops catering to them. I have a few small collections of outboard loops I occasionally use that are made more for the typical structured pop/rock song.

 The largest problem I usually have with loops is that they seldom if ever fit with my scratch ideas unless I allow myself to change my song to fit the loops instead of the other way around. In that case the feel of the tune is usually lost. I know we can change tempos and keys but sometimes it still isn't a fit.

Shouldn't that be "beeves"?

sharke
 

What I'd like to see from the Content Club is more bare bones drum loops, and not just techno. Rock, jazz, folk, country, blues....there are some of us who would like to be creative with these types of music but who don't have access to a drummer or a full band. 

What I'd really like to see is MIDI drum patterns that I can use with Superior Drummer and other drum instruments. I'm sure most of us would get far more use out of 100 good MIDI drum loops than we would out of 2000 cheesy techno stabs.  

 
Well said, a big +1 from me on that ^^^^
 
 

I think loops has a huge roll to play in todays music... its nothing more than an extension of a drum machine in some ways.. and while i do not use them to a great degree..their availability is allowing closet musicians to produce an entire track.. and it doesnt matter what the merit of said track is... more folks making music is better.

I have yet to download these loops..which probably is a testament to how good i think they are going to be... one shot samples for percussion is always welcome as are swells... but stabs and mixed rhythm parts are not needed by me..

So, what i would like to see is more midi drum patterns as stated above...and sure..despite my dog being still alive and the truck is running well, i still dont mind country being in there!..

Drumloops, never going to be one that follows the bass idea I have in my head, so I'm going to spend hours cutting up a loop so it can fit my bass and still have it sound bad? 5 minutes later I'm done just recording my drums using a kontakt drum library or some other well articulated drum library. Sure I could accumulate thousands of loops to have a chance to find one that fit my idea, still going to take longer to find one that fits, instead of just recording it in a couple minutes.

One shot samples? They are never ever multi sampled across a velocity range with round robins so I can map them out myself, shotgun city.. useless.

Mystic38

I think loops has a huge roll to play in todays music ... their availability is allowing closet musicians to produce an entire track.. and it doesnt matter what the merit of said track is... more folks making music is better.

If I use the stamp tool in Photoshop to put, say, a flower, in someone else's art work, does that make me an artist? Artist as in painter/drawer, not in the general sense. I would say absolutely not.

I just have a hard time giving someone credit as a musician if they use pre-made music and arrange it. Not a big deal either way, and it's kind of splitting hairs on my part to even bring this up, but it always makes me laugh when someone uses another persons music and calls themselves a musician.

I do agree that loops play a huge roll in today's music. I'd say 98% of what you hear on the radio is fake.