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| Manufacturer:
Sonic Foundry Disclaimer: The manufacturer provided DigiFreq with a unit of this product for review. Reviewed by Scott R. Garrigus | ||||||
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"Sonic Foundry and Jade Hill Studios present Rock/Pop Guitars, a beautifully crafted collection of guitar loops designed specifically as tools for chartbound singers and songwriters. Choose from a variety of jangly, bluesy, funky, and hard rock chord structures. And personalize your creations with guitar solos that range from clean and melodic to chunky and shredded. With over 600 loops to explore and choose from, there’s an infinite number of songs waiting to be created." This is the description you’ll find on the back of the CD jacket for Sonic Foundry’s new Loops For ACID product called Jade Hill: Rock/Pop Guitars. To be exact, there are 603 loops on this CD, all of which are of course in the Acidized WAV format and can be used with any ACID-compatible loop sequencing software, such as Sonic Foundry’s ACID and Cakewalk’s Sonar. The loops cover a variety of rhythmic and melodic styles as described above, and they are organized into 14 different folders on the CD. Each folder corresponds to a different style and contains separate part loops that when pieced together form an entire song. To be more accurate, each folder is like a construction set that contains all the parts needed to create an entire song in a particular style. Although, there are some exceptions where a folder only contains the parts for a single guitar performance. And that’s not to say you can’t mix and match loops from different folders. You’ll find that this works as well. The folders on the Rock/Pop Guitars CD are named and styled as follows: Delinquent (contains the parts for a slow rock song with laid back rhythms and clean guitars); Funk Duby (contains the parts for a single funky clean guitar performance); Gracie (contains the parts for a single mellow distorted guitar performance); Lazy Day (contains the parts for a medium tempo pop song with airy rhythms and acoustic guitars); Love Serum (contains the parts for a medium tempo rock song with both clean and distorted guitars); Mad Iba (contains the parts for a moderate up-tempo rock song with bass and distorted guitars); Metal Heave (contains the parts for a medium tempo rock or heavy metal song with highly distorted guitars); Roamin (contains the parts for a medium tempo blues/rock song with both clean and distorted guitars); Slow Drive (contains the parts for a slow rock song with distorted guitars); Sonic W (contains the parts for an up tempo rock song with flanged and distorted guitars); Swept Up (contains the parts for a medium tempo rock/pop song with distorted guitars). The three exceptions are the folders named Misc Lead Elements, Rhythms&Progressions 1, and Rhythms&Progressions 2. These folders contain miscellaneous lead, rhythm and progression loops as their names imply. These loops can be used in conjunction with the other song loops for more variety. The Misc Lead Elements folder provides mostly distorted lead parts with a few clean guitar loops. The Rhythms&Progressions folders provide a variety of both clean and distorted guitar parts. Notably missing from all the folders except Delinquent and Mad Iba, however, are bass guitar parts. This seems a bit strange since all of the songs represented on this disc could benefit from bass guitar. I’m not sure what the thinking was here, but it’s definitely an omission that can’t be overlooked. The quality of the loops on this disc is excellent. The audio is clean and clear, and the loops themselves are very well constructed with loop points that make song construction easy. I had a lot of fun mixing and matching these loops and using them on some of my own material when a real guitar player was just not available. I also liked the fact that aside from distortion (which was obviously necessary here), there were no other effects added to the loops. Everything was recorded straight and dry, making it easy for me to add my own effects (such as delay and reverberation) to the loops when needed. With the exception of the missing bass guitar loops from many of the folders on the CD, the Jade Hill: Rock/Pop Guitars Loops For ACID CD is definitely worth the asking price. And even though there’s no substitute for the real thing, it’s not overly difficult to simulate a bass part using MIDI. Guitar parts, on the other hand, are next to impossible to create convincingly with anything other than the real thing, and in that respect Jade Hill: Rock/Pop Guitars provides a wide variety of useful material, excellent sound quality, and an easy way for you to add realistic guitar parts to your rock and pop based compositions. |
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