Roots Reggae

Review: Roots Reggae
Sounds Good
Format : Audio
Review by Clif Marsiglio
Thursday, July 16, 1998

Touted as a Virtual Reggae Band, this disc does little to live up to that assumption, then again for $25 I'm not complaining. This disc is offered very economically and goes out of its way to present its data. All sounds are offered in CD Audio, wav and aiff formats. This is a bit overkill as everyone knows aiff is a mac format and macs being one of the more versatile machines can read both wav and aiff. Aiff offers internal looping, but wav only would have been nice and offer us a bit more stuff...I always like more stuff.

While I like what I hear, I notice a lot of inconsistancies, especially in the Hammond loops. The loops are given in several keys, but it sounds as though within the different keys, there are different effects and in the case of the B-3, different stops.
As a matter of asthetics, I really didn't care much for the lower tempi: the timing just seemed off. Unfortunately there are only 40 tempo within this set: 60, 70, 80, and 90. The problems with the two lower go away in the 80 and 90 tempos. They seem to flow and groove a bit better. Of particular note is the clavinet loops. These are just awesome. Some have distortion or an envelope filter, but they all have attitude. The rest of the instruments are just ok...nothing that really stands out. A bass loop here or there is good, but nothing else really stands out. The only thing I really was disapointed about was the fact nothing really felt like it matched the other tracks...as a demo, I wanted to use this thing as purely a construction set....no such luck. Once I did some real programming and used some of my own programming, I was able to give the reggae feel to my otherwise straight boring track.

Does this all sound too negative...well i don't mean it to be. As I mentioned, for $25 I can't complain too much. I may have to do a cross comparison if I ever pick up another reggae disc, but I like the results I get out of this...even with its limits.

Sounds Good -- http://www.ivo.se/sounds.good/
EastWest -- http://www.eastwestsounds.com