BEST SERVICE

Oct 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Dan Phillips

The exuberant cover of Dance Mega Drum-Kits ($99.95) boasts that it's “the ultimative dance drum collection.” Linguistic concerns aside, its promise of 569 kits with 1,500 kicks, 1,500 snares, 1,000 hi-hats, and 1,000 percussion hits led me to be hopeful. With so much material, some of it is bound to be useful, right? Sadly, the collection's many flaws overwhelm any numeric advantages.

The package includes two discs — an Akai S1000 CD-ROM and an audio CD — each with the complete set of sounds. I appreciated the inclusion of the audio CD because it's great for quickly auditioning sounds — and many sounds there are. The collection offers acoustic and electronic drums in a broad range of styles, from rough and gritty to crisp and clean. The kicks are my favorites; Kit 74's deep, beefy TR-808 kick literally rattles the walls, and Kit 441 features a thick, blatty, semidistorted TR-909 kick — good stuff!

I was initially surprised that many of the kick samples also include a layered hi-hat, but that quickly clued me in to Major Issue No. 1: in spite of the collection's title, you aren't getting “kits” at all. Instead, the sounds are sliced drum loops. In other words, the sound designers started with recordings of drumbeats, and then cut up the recordings to make each hit into a separate sample. Another disappointment was that, unlike many rhythm-slice libraries, MIDI files for re-creating the original patterns are not included.

Let Me Count the Ways

Using sliced drum loops in place of full kits can be problematic for a number of reasons. First, most of the kick and snare samples also include hats, which is inconvenient at best; it also makes certain patterns impossible to program (such as steady 8th-note hats with 16th-note accents from the kick alone). A few of the kicks are also offered in versions with the high end removed by filtering; although that helps isolate the kick sound, it removes much of the kick's punch.

Second, the hats that had been chopped from the middle of a phrase had excessive low-end ambience, presumably left over from a kick on a previous beat. That makes the sounds fairly useless, at least as conventional hats.

Third, dynamics are naturally limited to whatever was present in the source material. Sometimes there are soft and loud snares, for instance, and sometimes there are not. You can forget about Velocity switches, too; all samples are laid out across the keyboard, one per key.

Finally, the documentation contains no mention of where the source material came from, and it makes no claims of being “copyright free.” The samples are all single-hit (except for one full loop, in the Kit numbered 252-256), but some might still be recognizable because of effects or other unique sonic characteristics. Would that put a commercial project in jeopardy of copyright infringement? I don't know. Would I want to risk it? Probably not.

Look Up My Number

Major Issue No. 2 is the complete lack of useful documentation. The careful reader will have noticed that all of the program names cited in this review are in the form of “Kit (number).” That's exactly what the CD booklet offers, as well as the sample files themselves: Kit 1 through Kit 569 — no descriptive names, no genre titles, nothing except a number to help you find or remember a specific Program. Furthermore, after six pages of useless numeric names, the booklet offers eight pages of ads for other sample CDs from Best Service.

Overall, I was disappointed by Dance Mega Drum-Kits. It does offer some good sounds, but their usefulness is far outweighed by negative considerations.

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Overall EM Rating (1 through 5): 1.5

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