Shimmer & Shake – Music Tech – February 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Hand-held percussion is an often-overlooked element in modern music, with more attention being paid to the main drum and bass groove. However, it can be the clever use of a fast shaker rhythm that lifts a chorus and propels a track forward despite existing on an almost subconscious level. Shimmer & Shake, then, is an extensive collection of 2,350 loops and nearly 5,000 individual hand-held percussion samples from samples company Nine Volt Audio.
The collection comes as compressed RAR files spanning two DVDs in ACID WAV, Apple Loops, REX, Stylus RMX and Kontakt formats. It covers 25 different instruments, from traditional tambourines and maracas to more esoteric beer cans with seeds in and goats hooves attached to a handle… Each instrument has 89 different rhythms in 4/4, 3/4, 7/8 and 5/4 time signatures, plus individual shake sounds, accents, hits and rolls.
Nine Volt Audio has chosen to present the Apple Loops and ACID WAV versions at a slow 80BPM, as percussion loops sound much better when speeded up than they do when slowed down. However, to get the most out of this pack you’ll want to use the REX loops in Stylus RMX or the patches in Kontakt, which feature some fantastic scripting tricks. If you program a MIDI groove with the individual shaker samples, the swooshing attack can sound great at slow speeds but sloppy when speeded up. To combat this, Nine Volt Audio has added a Tight parameter that shortens the attack portion and greatly tightens the groove at higher speeds. It’s a simple but effective trick that allows you to fine-tune each sound to sit with your track, although this works only on the hits and not the loops.
There is also a range of other Kontakt knobs to control EQ, reverb and saturation, plus a superb humaniser section that can transform a rigid MIDI loop through randomising its timing, velocity, tuning and volume.
This is another highly flexible and well thought-out library from Nine Volt Audio that provides all the shaker sounds you’ll ever need.
Verdict A large and flexible pack of shaker loops and hits with some highly effective Kontakt scripting.
Rating 9/10 plus the Music Tech Innovation award
Click here for more information on Shimmer & Shake
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