MusicTech Magazine Review: Pure Country IV: Nashville Brushes in 3/4 and 6/8

“Despite its relatively low cost, the recording quality is superb, capturing the lightness and detail of the brushes, a neatly rounded kick drum, and just enough ambience to give the kit a sense of life and roominess.”

Although there’s certainly no shortage of drum loops to choose from, it can sometimes be difficult laying your hands on more genre-specific material, especially when you want a real kit played by a real person. Fortunately, Beta Monkey has turned out a particularly useful line of drum loops, many of which focus on particular styles – jazz, country and metal being just three – that are often overlooked by other samples developers.

At just $30, the libraries are also extremely competitively priced, making even the occasional ‘dabble’ easy to justify.

Pure Country IV follows on from the success of previous Pure Country releases, although this time the focus has been shifted towards 3/4 and 6/8 brushed grooves. Despite its relatively low cost, the recording quality is superb, capturing the lightness and detail of the brushes, a neatly rounded kick drum, and just enough ambience to give the kit a sense of life and roominess.

Pleasingly, the recordings have also been kept relatively clean (an important part of the Nashville sound), and this provides plenty of scope for you to add compression and EQ as you see fit.

All of the 300+ loops are clearly labeled, with count-ins, variation grooves, fills and so on. Tempos range from 52–165BPM. We also enjoyed the multi-sampled hits, which we quickly arranged into some useful programs for our EXS24 sampler.

It’s also interesting – despite the ‘country’ tag – how transportable these grooves are to other genres, making Pure Country IV well worth a look if you’re a fan of brushed playing in general. MC

Source: MusicTech MAGAZINE November 2007 – www.musictechmag.co.uk

Read the full .pdf version of this review: Pure_Country_Mini_Review_Nov2007