Beatz Diffusion

Format: Audio / Wav
Review by: Clif Marsiglio

Wednesday, December 02, 1998

AMG Beatz Diffusion

The Diffusion Series is AMG's answer to the home computer / bedroom musician/producer. All titles are offered in Audio, Wav, Aiff and Rex formats. The first is readable by any CD player, the next are PC and Mac formats respectively and lastly, the very popular (and cross platform) ReCycle format. The disc reviewed is a hybrid Audio/Wav format, very handy for times when I want to preview sounds without having to pop them up onto my sampler.

Beatz Diffusion offers a variety of sounds from producers from across AMG's collective. The artists included on this are: Gota Yashiki, Steve White, Tony Mason, Keith LeBlanc, Dave Ruffy, Phil Conti and Drumhead. As a bonus, the ROM portion includes a directory from Paul Gleadal. As one can probably tell from the title, this is a loop disc featuring entirely drums and percussion. As this seems to be a "greatest hits" kind of disc there is a lot of variety. One would hope so with so many artists.

Unfortunately, to get this much variety, one is left with few pickings from the artists one finds particularly interesting. Think of this as a sample sampler set. You have lots of artist you may or may not enjoy. Like it or not, sample discs are an individual thing. Everyone has different expectations of what they like and what they don't. If you don't have access to a music store with a Sample Jukebox, this is the closest thing you're going to get to finding one.

The sounds are all recorded very cleanly and are professionally edited. Everything one needs to hold down the groove is here. As mentioned, there are drawbacks. With this many artists, one only has a small palette to work with from each. My favorite on this disc is track 16 Kill Beat by Keith LeBlanc. It is presented in 8 variations and is the largest set of samples on this disc. It seems as though this was someone else's favorite as well. Perfect for any industrial, EBM or electronic type sound track. I'm gonna pick up one of LeBlanc's full discs as the price of this disc is well worth it for just this loop.

Although disappointed in search for more dark sounding beats, I soon found happiness a few tracks down with the Funky Ambient by Drumhead. Just a standard breakbeat, but presented in a way that caught my ear. Past this artist, one gets into the realm of Phil Gould. While there are only five tracks selected, the are presented in almost a song format. Each a minute or so in length. Don't feel bad if nothing grabs ya right away. If it does, you have everything you will need to finish up your track. If not, you probably won't find these very useful at all. As I mentioned before, these are very subjective types of sound.

The best sounds residing on this disc are the Dave Ruffy stuff. I luckily enough have a full copy of his 'Ruff Cuts' so these are just gravy to me. Tracks 28 and 29 (Skippy and Drum & Bass) grab one by the throat as the sonic nature just dominates the spectrum. This may actually be a problem because you're either going to have to match his sonics with your own music or eq the life out of them. Once one gets to track 31, this gets to be less of a problem as one is treated to about a minute and half of some of the best dub stuff I've heard in a while. I recently reviewed a whole Reggae disc that never made it to this quality and this is just one track. Enough about these, if ya wanna get some of these loops, skip this disc and go with Ruff Cuts.

The rest of this disc has some nice solid pieces on it, if I didn't mention them, its not because I thought they were bad, but because they did not fit what I use in my music. They are good pieces and and mostly held a bit back in the mix. They don't steal the spotlight from your own work and this may be far more important for your music. Most of the time I am working on a sole guitar piece, I grab things like this and play against the beats. In that instance, the music is far more important than the beats but would get boring fast with out them.

The total running time on the Audio portion is about 40 minutes so this cuts down the quantity of sounds a bit more (hey quit your bitchin', they're giving you samples so ya don't even need to reloop if your machine can handle wav...). Again, if one thinks of this as a sample sampler, one gets a far better view of this disc. If you're short on cash and can't afford to buy what you need, this will guide you in right direction. In my case, this multimode disc is great. I can sit, as I am doing now, in a coffee house and listen to everything while taking notes of what is useful to me and what isn't...and then go home and instantly transfer the sounds to my machine through its scsi interface.

Ratings-wise, I gave this an overall of 4 because of its usefulness. It received a 3 on the variety as there was tons of different loops to choose from, but not many variations given for the individual loops. The quality was good and the documentation was excellent (a readme file was included on the rom portion which makes things easy to deal with, especially when one looses the liner notes :)