Reviews
Trevor Loveys – In at the Deep End Review
Just in time for the nu deep renaissance, Loopmasters has released Trevor Loveys’ “In at the Deep End” deep house sample collection. The pack has the high quality and wide compatibility that you’d expect from a Loopmasters set: 24-bit WAVs, REX loops, Kontakt patches, Reason Refills, and Ableton Live sets of the samples are all available for download.
The drum samples sound fantastic: deep kicks, snappy snares, and crisp hi-hats abound. Everything has enough punch to cut through the mix, and there’s a decent variety of different drum timbres included. That said, the drum samples don’t stray much from the standard kick/snare/hi-hat, meaning that you’ll have to look elsewhere for crashes, rides, and percussion. The samples are grouped into drum kits, which works if you want to quickly load up a set of complementary samples, but makes it a little more difficult to quickly flip through the hi-hats or snares, for example. The attack times on some of the hats are a bit slower than normal, giving your beats an instant swinging, galloping feel — which you may or may not want. They’re easy enough to adjust in a sampler, though.
Trevor Loveys‘ synth hits and multi-samples are full, rich, and deep. Melancholy organs, spacy pads, heavily modulated leads — all the classic deep house sounds are here. One slight issue is that many of them are “one finger chord” style sounds, meaning that they sound great when played as single notes, but fall into discord if you play a chord with them. The bass patches all have that resonant, just slightly dirty old-school sound, and some serious deepness when played in the lower registers.
The loops section includes drums, bass, synth, and percussion, all grooving along at 120 to 124 beats per minute. The drums section has a nice mixture of breakbeat and floor-to-the-floor beats, and the drum loops are lightly (if at all) processed, meaning that it’ll be easy to integrate them into your productions. The percussion loops also sound good — but there are only a handful of them included. In a genre like deep house, where percussion can make or break your beat, a few more would have been nice (to be fair, there are a few more top loops mixed in with the drum loops). The bassline loops are big and deep; there’s a sharp, clicky attack present in quite a few of them, though, so you’re probably better off using the bass single-hit samples in a sampler. The music loops stick to the classic deep house style that the synth samples lay out: minor chords, fuzzy strings, electric pianos, and lots of spaced-out reverb and delay. These would be great for adding that little extra texture and background to a track.
Despite a few fairly minor shortcomings, Trevor Loveys’ “In at the Deep End — especially the drum samples, bass patches, and pad sounds — is well worth checking out if you’re looking for new sounds to incorporate into a deep house production.
James P is the creator of Producer Tools, the ultimate mobile app for music producers. Check out his music production tutorials at Quadrophone.com.