EastWest Black Butta 2 Audio

I have been making music since 1980, I have been producing music for the last 6 yrs. I play guitar, piano, saxophone, and drums.

My main style of music production is for R&B and Pop music, although I do some alternative rock and acoustic production. I have EMU samplers and Akai Samplers, including the venerable MPC2000XL.

I used the Black Butta 2 discs to produce demos on about 4 songs, basically using drum samples.

My studio uses Genelec's and Mackie HR824's as well as a Event subwoofer. I have a Steinberg Nuendo based recording setup.

This CD was NOT worth the full price tag because of the fact that the samples are not well split up. This was a problem with Black Butta 1, and subsequently Mad Jeff says that he gives you a better setup for drum samples on this disc, but its not what I would have wanted.

I can compare this disc to Black Butta 1, and tons of other audio based sample discs. It is better than Black Butta 1 for the amount of drum samples you get, but its no where near as good as DA Nu RnB for drum samples split up nice and clean and ready to dump into your sampler or into your software sampler(Kontakt,etc).

The cd is ok, but the biggest problem is that it seems the way this disc set was built was by playing a protools project, then soloing each protools track and recording it for each of the instruments. The problem with this is that the samples arent consistent on all tracks due to varying velocity on each recorded note. Some may say that this gives greater amount of samples, I say it slows you down cause then you have to listen to each track completely to make sure you dont miss anything, instead of just having the sample of a kick, then the sample of the snare, you get a whole track of kick, and a whole track of snare.

I dont like to use the tracks from these cd's because I produce my own, but I do like to take drum samples and tweak and effect to get my own sounds. This CD makes it harder than some I have bought.

Overall if you are getting into producing RnB or Urban music, and do not have any cd's this one is a good purchase for 89.00, but the overall value comes down to how well you can extract the elements you want from the cd, be prepared to spend a lot of time with Cool Edit or Wavelab listening and importing and chopping this cd to get about 12 distinctive drum kits.