I'll be reviewing a couple of WAV kits sent to me by Eric Daniels from PimpMyMPC. As you might guess from the name of the site, the kits are marketed primarily for the MPC market, but they also come in Battery, Reason and WAV formats. An important aspect to these kits is that they will be ready to import into your MPC right away since they come pre-packaged with the program files for almost every MPC model from 500 to 4000
My initial impression is that the kits are solid and tight. The samples are all 44.1Khz at 16-bit. The WAV files do not have any clicks and are perfectly cut to allow sounds to finish and without any excessive dead air. The sounds are also carefully normalized so that they all have the same relative volume.
The collections consist of drum hits, short instrumental riffs and sound effects. I was impressed by the way the many of the WAV samples are not needlessly stereo. This not only means they take less space in memory but it's easier to make them sit right in the mix.
Both the kits I viewed had 64 samples each which maps out to 4 banks of 16 pads on the MPC. I assume these layouts are just as smart as the samples themselves and I wish I had an MPC to run em through.
The samples themselves are excellent. As I have mentioned before, I have a massive collection of kits (most of which I never use) so I know a bad kit when I hear one and this is not a bad kit in any way. It will be moving to my favorites folder immediately.
The kicks are deep and you can feel 'em bump. The snares and claps are snappy and cut through nice. I don't know if Eric EQ'd these bad boys or just knows how to pick a sample, but they are almost flawless and very inspiring.
If I had any gripes about these kits it would two things, both of which I can easily overlook.
First, the samples are not named in a human friendly manner. For example, a kick sound might be named PROD3X45 and a snare PROD3X12. I understand if you get these pre-mapped to a Battery kit or and MPC this probably is not an issue.
Second, I don't use a lot of sampled instrument riff and hits normally so I probably would not a use for about 16 or so samples per kit. That said I could definitely hear a place for every sample in a song even if it's not my style.
Overall these kits are two that I am happy to have in my collection and I have to cut this review short because I have some inspiration to take advantage of. 
Warbeats Rating 9/10
For more information please visit the PimpMyMPC site: http://www.pimpmympc.com |