Doru Malaia 230 Ethnic Drums & Percussion Wav

35 Years experience, studio and live.
Classical, Ethnic, World
Giga Stucio 2.5
3 weeks
Gina 24, AKG K240M and K240DF Mackie HR824

Yes. It was worth the price.
There is a great variety of samples, sometimes too many to map across 88 keys. Documentation is non existant except for names of the instruments.
The only problem I see is that during sampeling there was something rattling in a lot of the low drums, either a loose mic stand or bad diaphram on the mic and this rattle is present in a lot of the drums that have resonance, however, for the price of $30.00 USD it's still a good buy.

Up until now, I have never bothered using samples as I've never liked the whole data management aspect of sampling. It always struck me as being more like science than having anything to do with art. Somehow or other, I was looking into ethnic drum samples though, as I have always loved using non-rock drum sounds and my trusty Yamaha RY-30 Ethnic Drum card was starting to sound a little overused to me. Whilst surfing, I came across Doru's name and found a hyperlink to his site and there were many site testimonials as to the quality of his samples. I've never been interested in loops as it has seemed as a lazy man's route to composing, so when I saw that his 230 ED&P sampler had no loops and that it was a mere $29, I ordered it. I use a combination of listening including through my M-Audio 1814 soundcard and through my Soundcraft LX-7 32 channel board and Audix monitors. So far, I have used the sounds by loading onto the Partition E of my hard drive. This really increases the speed of loading of the sounds into my Reason Redrum. From there, I can use it as a drum looper, or as a track within Cubase.

After ordering the CD, I got it inside of 7 days all of the way from Romania. It doesn't get any faster than that! The sounds are absolutlely clean and pristinely recorded. He offers them in a couple of formats, 16 and 24 bit formats; mine is the 16 bit. Each of the 230 categories of sound folders has from 5 to 143 different and distinct samples. There are a total of 6400 one shot samples. They have no effects added and they are loaded alphabetically on the CD for easy locating. If you've ever needed ethnic sounds of any stripe, you owe it to yourself to pick up this incredibly cheaply priced CD. I don't have a favourite yet, as I just haven't had enough time to get through all of them. I also have never heard of scores of the instruments sampled, but the variety is stunning and highly usable. Thanks Doru!