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Hadeeth - Arabic Rhythms | Keyboard

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Pros: Crisp, detailed sounds. Construction kit tracks.
Cons: Each track contains four or eight repetitions of a short loop, with no performance variations.
Bottom Line: Nice stuff for grooves, but short on variety.

Hand percussion loops are a wonderful resource for spicing up a rhythm track. A good drummer can add endless nuances to a beat using gentle fingertaps for ghost notes and rolls. Layer one or two of these loops under a conventional beat and you're cooking up something tasty.

In Hadeeth Arabic Rhythms, the main focus is on tabla, duff, tar, duhollah, and tabel, with tambourine and finger cymbals providing the sizzle. The drums are played crisply throughout, with a good rhythmic feel. The audio quality is very clean and transparent-good micing, no noise, nice even dynamic levels, and no gimmicks, just a hint of room ambience. "Many of these loops remind me of those used on the excellent Freaks and Icons by Dzihan and Kamien [featured Mar, '01]," commented assistant editor Ken Hughes. "They're performed with spirit and brimming with character without being gratuitously lo-fi. I appreciate that."

Most of the rhythms are in 4/4, but a few are in a slow 6/8 and one or two in 5/4 or 7/4. Meters and tempos are given in the liner notes, but they aren't all accurate, so let your ears be the judge. "Aside from a couple of little documentation foibles," Ken noted, "the tempos are rock-solid and the pocket is deep. Some of the loops are so flawlessly performed, I wonder if they were Pro Tooled to perfection." Most tempos are in the 100-120 bpm range.

Tracks 2 through 39 and 51 are construction kits with an average of six or seven elements, one of which is a drum machine groove that uses trap kit sounds. Tracks 51 through 72 are also construction kits, but these are simpler, with three or four hand percussion elements each, and no trap kit. Tracks 41 through 50 are full percussion section grooves with no breakout tracks. Tracks 73 through 83 contain an assortment of single hits and rolls.

My only issue with Hadeeth is that each track is highly repetitive. In the first bunch of construction kits, you typically get the same beat repeated four or even eight times, with no audible variations whatever. In some of the kits in the second group I could detect minute variations that suggested the rhythm had been performed rather than looped, but even here there were almost no performance variations-no added flams, ghost notes, rolls, or fills on the second, third, or fourth bar. For my money, this translates to a lot of wasted disc space.

If you want to use Hadeeth to construct a dynamically moving film-type composition, you'll need to string together bits from various tracks or add variations by slicing the beats up in your sampler. For loop-based pop music the shortage of variations may be less of an issue. Whether you're producing pop or film music, though, you'll love the audio quality and the vigorous performances.

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