Electro ID

Dancehall Madness

Introduction

I remember visiting the Ueberschall booth a few years back at the NAMM show in Las Vegas. There was a bunch of laptops and lcd screens hooked up to some midi keyboards. These were “music stations” allowing you to play with this strange loop based software that had a radar-like display with a blurry orange line sweeping around in a circle. A closer examination revealed that the “radar scope” was actually the waveform of a music loop displayed in a circle. Vut iz dis? One of the guys from the Ueberschall team (friendly people I tell ya) was kind enough to demo it for me by clicking and dragging his mouse around the circle and making crazy variations with a saxophone loop that had been loaded up. I was truly amazed by this “circle thing,” but I also left the booth thinking "...if only they had newer, crazier electronic sounds loaded in there…”

Well that’s pretty much what they’ve done. They’ve added quite a few new sounds in fact. The Uberschall library has grown 10 fold since, and they have expanded their sonic stockpile to cover pretty much any style of music including sounds for film/post. Today we’re taking a look at their Dancehall Madness and Electro ID titles. They offer loops and construction kits from reggaeton/dancehall, and electro/tech/schranz, respectively. (And they both use the “circle thing.”)


Installation

The setup is a four step process, which I found a little time-consuming but it’s not hard to do.

1) Pop in the DVD, and install/double click on the program called “Elastik.” (This is the name that Ueberschall came up with to describe its remarkably smooth time-stretching.) It can be used as RTAS, AU, VST, or standalone.

2) After you install Elastik you can copy the sound library into a folder on your hard drive. I just put mine in the “Elastik” program folder. You can copy any future Ueberschall libraries the same way, but you have to unlock them from the setup window in the program. You only have to install Elastik once; you don’t have install it each time you buy a new library.

3) Start the program. The setup window is the tiny icon on the bottom right hand corner of Elastik’s window. Open that, click “add” and find your libraries. Note the “challenge code.” You need this to authorize the libraries, which is a challenge-response type.

4) Go to www.ueberschall.com and register the libraries, enter the “challenge code” and they will give you a “response code” which you copy to the setup window. Now the libraries are unlocked.

Getting Started

The Elastik interface is pretty easy to use and you can quickly figure out how to control everything in a few minutes by just clicking around a bit. The printed manual explains every function in-depth but has very small text and reminds me of reading an old Nintendo game instruction manual. That being said, there were a few advanced functions I did not understand until I read the manual, so it's important to take a look at it. The manual is less than 20 pages.

The Elastik program window is a smooth-looking silver box with a radar-like display for the loop or sound being played. When you hit the c1 key on the virtual keyboard (near the bottom) or on your midi keyboard, the loop starts to play, making the radar line thingy start to sweep around in a circle, like The Hunt for Red October. On the outer edge of the circle there are two squares labeled “E” and “S.” You can drag these around and kind of make different pizza-slice shapes to create variations in the loop. You can double click on the “E” and “S” squares to lock/unlock them to each other. It sounds weird, but it’s one of the most fun-to-use loop controls I’ve ever tried. I sat there for a good twenty-minutes just playing with this sonic pizza thing at first. It's like playing a video game.

To the left of the radar-like display are the menus to scroll through your sounds and libraries. Below that is a Volume and Pan slider. In the middle section there are controls for Tempo, Pitch, Reverse, Loop On/Off, Quantize Grid, and you can choose what outputs on your soundcard to send to. Here you can also chose from 4 types of time-stretch algorithms (made by zplane.development) to suit different types of material. I think the time-stretching sounds smooth and professional, even at extreme settings. Try switching it to “pro” mode in the setup section for even better results.

On the bottom is a simple filter section with an amp envelope for Attack and Release. You can set the filter from High, Low, Band Pass, or Notch and dial in 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, or 72 db of slope. The sound quality of the filter/env section won't out do your Moog Little Phatty, but it provides a nice steep slope and some cutoff options which are important for some basic filter tricks. There is also an option here to “slice” the loop up and assign the slices to the virtual keyboard below.

Each of the loops’ tracks are individually separated and can be triggered with a different midi note, or by clicking the virtual keyboard. This gives you finer control over what parts you want to use to construct your own remix. For example, you could mute or solo the synths, percussion, vocals, basslines, drums, etc. It's like working with a multitrack version of the loop. Every single loop in the Elastik library can do this.

One caveat, before we go on, is that Elastik doesn't let you load your own loops, so it's not a universal loop player, so to speak. This is probably because the advanced time stretching algorithms were too complex to work optimally in real-time. Also, with premade libraries, Ueberschall can offer high quality multitrack loops so you can have control over things. Software does advance very quickly, so perhaps there will soon be a day where Elastik is used as a loop player with excellent time-stretching.

Nice buttons, but how does it sound?

As far as actual recording quality I give Electro ID and Dancehall Madness a thumbs up. The synth parts in both libraries sound loud, warm, interesting and phat, and I personally noticed the use of high quality analog synths in the recordings, which was a nice surprise. The vocals are recorded clean and authentic, drums are loud and snappy, and the mixdown sounds great (dynamically); it's in the pocket, at least for urban/electronic music.

The musicianship on Electro ID is a thumbs up, for sure. Whoever played on these tracks is a synth wizard, and for the most part hits it on the money. Electro ID is full of hard hitting blips and beeps and does not sound cheesy like most "electro" soundbanks. There is a liberal dose of sound-mangling going on here without being shy on the FX knob. There is an immense amount of sound stuffed into each loop. These are full, high energy, high velocity, party party party vibe movements for your enjoyment. The loops are more on the "hardstyle" core/schranz tip. There were a few electro breaks, but the ones I liked best were the forward sounding, dark thumpers with gritty analog bass sweeps. Excellent use of Virus keyboard type sounds as well as traditional German dnb patches, a lot of processing and some of that deeper eastern/eurasian melodic sound usually associated with that side of Earth.

Dancehall Madness proves fairly consistent with the quality of Ueberschall libraries, and there is a high caliber of musicianship here as well. There is a vocalist used here that sounds righteously authentic and bounces dem riddems with a true Dancehall voice. Unfortunately, there is mostly tech-style synths playing all of the parts which doesn't always quite hit as hard as real reggae stabs, drums/percussion or dubs. Even with the gaudy synths being used, most of the melodies played are very mysterious and deep which surprisingly, doesn't detract too much from the original dancehall vibe. A few loops were a bit too "theatric" with the synth parts for my taste, but there were also quite a few that hit the sweet spot. Most of the drums are shiny and electronic style. They are well placed and do the job sufficiently, but after a while I was dying to hear some drums with extra dirty compression or even dubs with that old "rolled off" texture sprinkled in there. I did find a couple of dirt loops, but not enough to satisfy. Not a big deal because overall, there was enough dancehall vibe here in general to keep me going for months. I must say that a lot of these tracks sound convincing.

Real World Usage

I tried making a few tracks soley with the libraries for fun at first, so I just recorded the outputs of Elastik into my Pro Tools system and played around with the pizza slicer thing until I got a pretty cool stutter edit going and then chopped that in ol' Pro Tools. But then I wanted to get a bit more serious so I started taking the loop into my own hands and chopped it up into tiny bits and pieces and assigned it to some sample buttons on my Pad Kontrol. 3 million stutters later I decided to use the library in a more traditional way and do a multitrack remix. I replaced parts with my own sounds and kept the sounds I liked. This way, I can use it as a scratchpad. (See the audio examples below)

Conclusion

Electro ID and Dancehall Madness are nice additions to the loops library pot and I recommend these to people who are either specializing in these genres, or for post-production individuals looking to expand a sonic menu. The synth/drum programming is well done and I think you'll agree that there is a level of authenticity that goes beyond the average loop library. The "radar-style" interface is really fun to play with when you're bored or looking for new variations. You can always simply chop up the loops yourself, and you have control over each individual sound, as if you are doing a multitrack remix. I myself don't specialize in either of these genres nor do I write music for film/tv but have found these two libraries of pretty good use in my own music. Listen to the mp3 examples below and see what you think.

Dancehall Madness Demo

Electro ID Demo

Dancehall Original Loop

Dancehall Pitch Down Loop

Electro ID Original Loop

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