Minimal Techno – iDJ magazine – June 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Minimal is still a big buzzword, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that Ueberschall have jumped on a rickety old bandwagon. But where other software companies have thrown together a meagre set of low-quality lo-fi glitchiness and pump it out with the m-word in the title, this is something very special.
What makes Ueberschall’s sample sets stand out from the pack is the unique loop player software. The Elastik Player gives you a smooth user-friendly way to audition each loop, either as a stand-alone program or within your host sequencer.
The Elastik interface opens a window containing a set of concise controls and the distinctive ‘LoopEye’ viewer – a circular clock-face style visual display of each wave-form. Various buttons and sliders can be used to control high-speed time-stretching, pitch-shifting, filter and mapping tools. After auditioning and tweaking a sample, you can then choose to bounce down the original or your customised version as a wav file into your arrangement. Although most of us already have all these functions available to us as part of various other VST’s such as Halion, the audio engine that comes dedicated to Elastik gives some added flexibility which makes the process quicker and less memory-intensive.
Sample-wise there’s 1.6Gb on offer. Each of the 75 construction kits offer plenty of depth and scope provided by the sets and their respective 1200 loops and samples that could be used for much more than just minimal alone.
Produced by Asem Shama they are all solid and of the high-quality you’d expect from Ueberschall. The great kick drum sounds could be worth the spend on their own, and will easily find their way into anything from electro to hip-hop. With genres bending and styles blending across the spectrum of electronic music, this flexibility could be what every producer needs.
Verdict
Sound Quality: 19/20
Build Quality: 20/20
Ease of Use: 17/20
Value for Money: 17/20
Feature set: 19/20
iDJ Rating: 92%
A virtual instrument with plenty of loop-manipulating tools and a versatile collection of sounds, make this much more than just a collection of samples.
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