Retro-Funky Breaks | Sound On Sound

Retro-Funky Breaks is aimed at those producing any kind of retro-inspired style of dance music or old-school hip-hop. Made up primarily of drum, percussion, bass guitar, lead synth, rhythm guitar, brass, spoken male vocal and turntable-scratching performances, the 26 construction kits are funky without being too cheesy, and inventive without breaking out of a pretty well-defined niche. Over 1200 loops cover tempos from 90-135bpm: slow enough for hip-hop and big-beat; fast enough for many house sub-genres.

The drums are terrifically performed by Mike Kalajian and Jennifer Corsaro, and are a highlight. They're groovier than a corrugated medallion! I was impressed by how they've pulled fresh-sounding patterns out of the bag while only rarely trespassing over the title's stylistic boundaries. The sound is also fantastically dog-eared and fuzzy, giving each loop lots of the unique, hooky sonic character that's so crucial for invigorating programmed arrangements. The restricted frequency range of many sounds gives the advantage that they're often much easier to place in the mix than spectrum-hogging hi-fi samples. Percussion includes congas, bongo, cowbell, tambourine, triangle and the odd agogo (is there any other kind?), but these loops are much more straight-ahead.

The basses deliver a great vintage-inspired sound too, and a judicious shovel of the expected hyperactive performance tics. However, while they are as tight as a duck's derriere alongside certain drum loops in their respective kit, they're as tight as Jay Z's trousers with others, which might make the kits less flexible for some users.

The mostly histrionic lead-synth loops, spasmodic guitar rhythms and furious turntablism that fill out the rest of the library all reminded me a bit of Prince's New Power Generation, which is no bad thing. As with the drum and bass loops, no compressor has been left uncranked and the flavours of distortion are many and varied - but, in the main, well-judged enough to avoid any fatiguing harshness. Effects are pretty heavy and of a vintage bent, and overall I like the way these seem to have been chosen specifically to complement the sounds.

Annoyingly, there are no 'dry' versions of the instrument samples, so you're stuck with heavy effects even if you don't want them. If only Big Fish had provided a separate, dry version of any loops that obvious delay and reverb treatments, you'd have had proper control over the sound at mixdown and the library would have then been much more widely usable. What makes this more galling is that the scratch-DJ loops make up more than a third of the samples (roughly equal to the combined tally of drum, bass, guitar, and synth loops!), and while these aren't without some gems, they mostly feel to me like filler which could (and should) have been strenuously weeded to make space for dry versions of other, more interesting samples.

However, the bottom line is that Retro-Funky Breaks isn't the most expensive of libraries, and it manages the difficult balancing act of sounding both retro and current at the same time - very timely too, given the ascendance of artists like Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse. In fact, you might find that the drums alone warrant the modest price of admission.