Been a while since I updated this blog. While I have been productive, I felt there wasn't too much worth writing up here until recently.
That being said, yesterday a very rare sample CD arrived yesterday: Noize Loops 1, a 1999 sample CD created by Sonic Mayhem and distributed through Big Fish Audio.
That being said, yesterday a very rare sample CD arrived yesterday: Noize Loops 1, a 1999 sample CD created by Sonic Mayhem and distributed through Big Fish Audio.
This sample CD made a minor impact among industrial and darker soundtrack composers in the early 2000s, yet it's so hard to find now that there aren't even any pirate downloads of it available on the net. It's also not to be confused with the official Reason Refill under a very similar name, which has different content.
As the name suggests, it's dedicated to very noisy sounds, though the word "Loops" in the name also makes it a bit misleading as there are also a handful of dark ambiences (a la its still-available sequel library, Toxic Textures) and drum oneshots as well.
Looking at the CD before I inserted it, I noticed a warning about being so noisy it can cause speaker damage. Not sure if this was a sincere warning or a marketing gimick, but either way, upon listening to most of the loops, it makes sense why that text was printed onto the disc: the overwhelming majority of drumloops are distorted and, in some cases, bitcrushed to an extent that average listeners would question how these could be used for music production.
The booklet (its cover shown above) was helpful for providing name and tempo information for the individual sounds, but some of the tempos were also a bit misleading: not all of the loops are even your conventional 4/4 time signature! While this can be helpful for any projects that require, for instance, a 5/4 time signature, it would've been nice to correct the tempo information to represent the beats in the time signature they're actually in, and there are also no notices regarding different time signatures, even if because most of the loops are are indeed 4/4.
Looking at the waveforms in Audacity, many of the loops even have significant DC offset at points, even if generally nowhere near as bad as many sounds from the OMI CD's for the Emulator II. The sound itself, with the exception of the ambiences, most of the Calm Motion category, and a very few outliers elsewhere, is also generally extremely distorted, to the point that I question whether I can get myself to use even most of them during my lifetime not because there's a large variety, but because of whether they can be considered useful or not, even despite my mild interest in industrial instrumentals.
Again, it's not all loops, but generally speaking, the ambiences are too complex to be useable in most projects, even if it is nothing compared to Toxic Textures. For that matter, I recognized an unprocessed sample from Distorted Reality 2 in one of them, even if it was mixed in with other sounds, which could be one reason why the complete library is so hard to find now? The drumshots at the very end of the CD (sans a test sine wave) are more useable, though the snares all have questionable decays due to how much they were distorted.
Regardless of my personal qualms against the actual sound for many samples, I actually give this library more credit than I describe: a 3 out of 5. While I do prefer against all-out distortion at all times, this sample CD did make a impact among NIN wannabes and soundtrack composers who catered to the industrial genre. If anyone wants a teaser that both contains most of the useful sounds and is still legally available, Big Fish Audio released two Apple-Loop-format compilations of their late 90s and early 2000s products. The one that includes the categorization of the original Noize Loops CD is available for purchase here.
As the name suggests, it's dedicated to very noisy sounds, though the word "Loops" in the name also makes it a bit misleading as there are also a handful of dark ambiences (a la its still-available sequel library, Toxic Textures) and drum oneshots as well.
Looking at the CD before I inserted it, I noticed a warning about being so noisy it can cause speaker damage. Not sure if this was a sincere warning or a marketing gimick, but either way, upon listening to most of the loops, it makes sense why that text was printed onto the disc: the overwhelming majority of drumloops are distorted and, in some cases, bitcrushed to an extent that average listeners would question how these could be used for music production.
The booklet (its cover shown above) was helpful for providing name and tempo information for the individual sounds, but some of the tempos were also a bit misleading: not all of the loops are even your conventional 4/4 time signature! While this can be helpful for any projects that require, for instance, a 5/4 time signature, it would've been nice to correct the tempo information to represent the beats in the time signature they're actually in, and there are also no notices regarding different time signatures, even if because most of the loops are are indeed 4/4.
Looking at the waveforms in Audacity, many of the loops even have significant DC offset at points, even if generally nowhere near as bad as many sounds from the OMI CD's for the Emulator II. The sound itself, with the exception of the ambiences, most of the Calm Motion category, and a very few outliers elsewhere, is also generally extremely distorted, to the point that I question whether I can get myself to use even most of them during my lifetime not because there's a large variety, but because of whether they can be considered useful or not, even despite my mild interest in industrial instrumentals.
Again, it's not all loops, but generally speaking, the ambiences are too complex to be useable in most projects, even if it is nothing compared to Toxic Textures. For that matter, I recognized an unprocessed sample from Distorted Reality 2 in one of them, even if it was mixed in with other sounds, which could be one reason why the complete library is so hard to find now? The drumshots at the very end of the CD (sans a test sine wave) are more useable, though the snares all have questionable decays due to how much they were distorted.
Regardless of my personal qualms against the actual sound for many samples, I actually give this library more credit than I describe: a 3 out of 5. While I do prefer against all-out distortion at all times, this sample CD did make a impact among NIN wannabes and soundtrack composers who catered to the industrial genre. If anyone wants a teaser that both contains most of the useful sounds and is still legally available, Big Fish Audio released two Apple-Loop-format compilations of their late 90s and early 2000s products. The one that includes the categorization of the original Noize Loops CD is available for purchase here.
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