Big Fish Audio | Keyboard Magazine | Roots of India Product Review
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Roots of India | Keyboard Magazine

Rating: SOUND QUALITY: 8 PERFORMANCES: 8 BANG FOR THE BUCK: 7 Back to Roots of India product details

Virtuoso hand drumming is an ancient tradition in India. Most familiar in the West are the tabla, but the music of various local regions uses such drums as the dhol, thavul. and pakhwaj. These instruments and numerous others are captured on Roots of India, which was produced by Indian musician Tabun Sutradhar. The performances are spirited and detailed: Whether you're putting together an ambient/world music track, a radio jingle for a local restaurant, or a hip-hop tune that needs a wacky break, this CD will do the job.

The tracks use a construction kit format, with a mix (usually three instruments) followed by loops of the individual instruments. Most of the patterns are four bars long-and these are definitely not one-bar samples that have been prelooped for you: You get four full bars of performance, complete with little nuances. Tempos are given in the liner notes, and you get plenty of variations at a few common tempos (100, 115, 120, 145, etc.), which makes it easier to match the samples with one another. According to Big Fish, the lineup of samples in the Akai S1000 CD-ROM is identical to that of the audio CD.

While the construction kits don't include individual drum hits, the CD is rounded out with 17 tracks of hits. These give you a reasonable variety of dynamics and types of strokes for each drum, and the head is allowed to ring rather than being choked off, which is ideal, as it allows you to mute the sound with an envelope if you need to.

The drums are miked in stereo, with an almost artificially wide spread, I'm guessing, but it sounds as if two mics were pointed inward at each drum from opposite sides. "The stereo spread may play a part," Mark Vail noted, "in making some of the sounds seem almost synthetic. The drums have a distinct thwok that makes them pop out of the speakers." In addition to hand drums, most of the tracks include a high-pitched cymbal, such as the taal or manjeera, or perhaps a shaker. Brief descriptions of the instruments used are provided in the liner notes.

The stylistic palette covers Bhajan, Qawali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, and other regional beats. They all sound distinctively Indian to this American's ears. Somehow I doubt that all of the regional styles are in 4/4 time, though, and that's what you get here, except for a few triplet-based patterns that could be used in 3/4.

I would have liked to hear more fills, and flourishes along with the grooves. Track 85, which has bit of jamming on ganjeera, is the only fill-oriented tack on the CD-and no tempo is given for it. Aside from that criticism, I feel Roots of India is a very sold value.

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