LoFi Junkiez Vol. 1

Wizoo
Format: Wav/AIFF

Review by Sonik Staff
Sunday, December 03, 2000

LoFi Junkiez is the first of Wizoo's 'TrashCan' loops series. Based on lower bit sample, old drum machines and hard compression, they make a great starting point. I picked this disc up from the manufacturer several months ago hoping to be ecstatic about it, but ultimately becoming bored with most of the offerings. There just isn't enough to keep one occupied.

Described as Big Beat and Break Beat drum loops 'Totally phucked up but phunk.eee'. LoFi Junkiez is mixed Wav/AIFF disc with both Stereo and Mono variations focusing on the Cologne techno stylings. The loops have a lot of energy and are pretty authentic, but you have your work cut out for you if ya don't want to sound like everyone else.

This disc is rather limited in scope. This may be both a godsend with all the discs trying to be everything for everyone, or a disappointment because there just isn't enough here. The loops are presented in several formats, but ultimately, you will be looking at about 50 megs of information total with 90 loops for the most part, grouped into 24 variations on a theme with 18 free standing loops.

This is the main problem with this disc. If you really want to use this to its fullest potential, you will need additional sound material in the same vein as this soundware. The disc is relatively inexpensive, so there is no reason not to buy the second in the series Lo Fi Junkiez Vol. II, but that betrays the logic of 'cheap' sound discs. The sounds are so idiosyncratic that this is probably the only source of 'same sounding' sounds around. Your other alternative is to break out ReCycle and have a go at it, building custom kits and either thinning the loops when ya need them thinned or randomizing the order when you need to mix things up. There are other cheaper alternatives to ReCycle, such as Beat Creator or Tuareg, both only available for Windows, but making this sort of thing a breeze.

What do I like about this? While the different versions artificially inflate the size of this disc, I was able to copy the Stereo AIFFs over to Zip and read these directly into my sampler with no additional processing. The loop points were perfect, although I prefer to simply retrigger in most circumstances, and everything synced. The loops are short and to the point, usually just single bar, so this means I could load all the variations, even in stereo, without taking up too much memory. Converting the loops for usage with the softsynths I use was even easier.

In conclusion, the only problem I have with this is the lack of material. The disc is only $30US but I would rather pay twice this and be sure that I had everything I need in one package. You will probably want to edit this up in your favorite groove-type editor, but they are just as usable in their raw form, not that everyone else in the world with a couple of bucks in their pocket didn't already notice this. I encourage the programmers to do a full-length disc in their next go around and give us more. While you are at it, a little more descriptive liner notes would be quite nice.