EastWest Breakz From The Nu Skool Audio

I've been playing music for about 20 years as of the date of this writing, but I've only gotten heavily into sampling this past year.

My writing style runs all over the place, from acoustic pop to industrial, metal and euro dance. I'm currently working on a dance/rock record with a female vocalist.

My sampler is a Roland SP-808EX, and I'm sequencing and doing all of my recording into a Roland VS-1680. I've had this sample disc for about 8 months, and I'm listening to the samples through either my AKG K240Ms or my Event 20/20bas monitors.

This was the first sample disc I've ever bought, and still one of the best. The (audio) disc is filled with 4 to 5 samples per track, each consisting of about 16 bar beats. There are basically two portions of this disc - some electronic sounding loops and some more acoustic sounding loops.

First of all, the beats provided in the booklet are all accurately tempo matched, unlike lots of other sample libraries I've used. You would think that's a no-brainer, but I've basically decided not to use the libraries that aren't accurately tempo matched, since it takes awhile to get the loop points correct.

With the audio version, you really only get the beat as it is, unlike other libraries where you can build up the beats from either individual elements or individual sounds.

Typically, most beats are very unique and only have one fill, which you would think makes them relatively useless. In actuality, because I've been mixing samples, my songs have interesting drum parts without a lot of fills. I've also been able to incorporate different elements to make up for the lack of fills.

One other thing I like about this library is that the samples are organized by tempo, rather than sample name. That makes it really easy to find a beat to match the song I'm writing.

Regarding the sound quality of the samples, they're pretty good, but there are some slightly lo-fi effects that sound cool for some samples, not so great for others.

I wish there were a few more sub 60bpm beats, but overall I've found use for a lot of samples and have actually sped up a few of my songs to match a sample that I like. I don't know about other hardware, but when I significantly change a tempo on the SP-808EX, the sample sounds like crap.

I wouldn't recommend this library to someone who is writing more straight ahead rock stuff (not enough fills), nor for drum n' bass (not enough d&b fast beats) or even trip hop (not enough good slow stuff), but for mid tempo electronic stuff, this is a great disc. It turned about to be exactly what I was looking for for the project I'm working on.

The audio samples at www.soundsonline.com are very good representations of what you get. Good organization, great samples and correct tempo matching make this disc a great value, but like different guitars, your mileage will vary based on what you're into.