Beta Monkey Music Drums Only Wav

I've been producing rock, r&b, and pop music for over ten years.
Currently using Recycle, Cubase, Nuendo, and Wavelab.
Recording to a Carilon Computer Win XP, RME Hammerfall sound card, and Nuendo 8 I/O interface.

This is for the Beta Monkey drum libraries.
I don't remember exactly how much I paid per CD, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to other drum loop CD's. I first bought the "Alt & Modern Rock Drum Grooves" together with the "Drum Werks Volume V." I was blown away by the quality of the sound. The CD's came with all the styles I would need in that category plus more. The drummer is pretty tight so I don't have to edit that much, and the sounds are pretty dry with a little of the room - so you can add your own effects. I normally import the loops into Recycle and dial in my tempo. I have already used the loops on many tracks - and the result is quite impressive. As soon as I heard of the new release "Classic Backbeats Plus" I immediately bought both CD's in the series. Once again I was blown away. I highly recommend getting anything these guys put out. There is no question that these loops stand out against anything else in the drum loop market. Check it out for yourself: www.betamonkeymusic.com

I have been using an alesis sr-16 drum machine for the past couple years, but after getting sick of it, I purchased Fruityloops to do drum programming on my computer... as my first set of drum samples, I picked this up. I'm using it primarily for rock-based music. I've had this sample set for only about a week now, and am posting my initial impressions.

For the price, I think it's a great set. Most of the other drum sample sets I saw (such as Big Fish) were closer to the $100 range. At $30, this seemed like a really good deal, and I still believe so. It has a decent variety of sounds - the majority of it is clean, unprocessed acoustic drum hits, but there's also a section on the disc for processed hits (compression, EQ, distortion, etc) and a good selection for synthetic drum hits. The quality of sound ranges from hi-fi to lo-fi. I'm happy with the set, BUT:

I think the CD could have been put together a little more professionally.
1) Many samples have a little click towards the end of the sample - I can easily remove it with a wav editor, but I shouldn't have to. That should have been done before they packaged these samples up.
2) There are many doubles on the CD. Two different directories may contain some of the exact same hits, and other directories will have hits with the exact same name, but be different in the actual sound.
3) There are a good deal of 'combo-hits', such as kick+hihat, kick+snare, etc... those are pretty silly, if I want a kick and a hihat going at the same time, I'll program it myself.
4) The directory structure could be organized a bit better - there are a LOT of directories, and a couple of them are empty (??). It would have been much better if it was divided up by particular drum set - a directory that says "Pearl drum set, whatever cymbals, miked with whatever" and in that directory, have all the hits from that session - kick, snare, crash, etc... and sub directories for processed drum sounds. Instead, the directories are pretty scattered. The first thing I did after copying them to my hard drive was to re-organize them by drum hit (Snare, Kick, etc) so I'd have some hope of being able to wade through the whole mess.

So, maybe because this is my first CD of drum samples, I was expecting too much - I have no basis of comparison really. I'm still happy with the set, and the customer service was great+kind; they have several cd's worth of pre-recorded acidized loops too. I'll keep them in mind if I ever want to get into that.

I recommend it.