The latest release from Zero-G promises ‘downtempo heaven’, but is it all a little bit too retro?
Lounge & Chill‘s sultry soul is divided into 32 construction kits, each housed in a tempo- and key-labelled folder containing all relevant mix elements broken out. So in ‘Dreamesque’, for example, you get two basslines, a synth, electric piano, rimshot, ride, kick and hat, allowing you to remix the stems according to your needs. To make life even easier, various pre-mixed elements are made available too, including the full drum mix and musical backing. So if you’re feeling really lazy, you can just layer up the two tracks and send the result to a sync agency!
Beyond the kits, you’re given a handful of additional loops, including some 90 bpm guitar loops, 41 drum loops (including variants) and a scattering of electric piano progressions and toplines.
All loops are offered as 24-bit Acidized WAVs and in Apple Loops and REX2 format, with additional presets for the most popular samplers.
Sound-wise, the quality is high. Playing is tight, recording is of a high quality and you get a lot of real instrumentation for your bucks. In today’s sample market, the kind of talent on display here is a rare thing – it’s nice to find a product with real instruments, and real kits recorded by real engineers in real studios.
Sounds range from moon-laced late-night 70 bpm workouts – with lush pads and meandering arpeggios – to spritely Latin-influenced grooves replete with slinky acoustic guitars and tight percussion. In terms of balance, it’s probably fair to say that this is more lounge than chill (the tempos of the loops bear this out), with a highly authentic line in ’70s and ’80s-influenced ‘kitsch’ soundtrack.
Plus points, then: good playing, nice recordings, intuitive layout and a good smattering of inspiring kits.
Zero-G are, of course, veterans of the sample game, touting their wares long before notable kings of the new school were sucking on their first 16-bit teats. Theirs is a proud heritage indeed and dance musicians of a certain generation will inevitably have used at least some of their sounds in productions past.
In some ways it’s the weight of this history which holds Zero-G back with this collection (and others in their vast catalogue), rooting them in the past and stopping them from fully embracing the huge market of newer sample consumers.
The first issue is cost; at £60.95, this collection will be priced out of the budgets of many producers. Studios and top players don’t come cheap, but with sample packs generally becoming smaller and cheaper over the last few years Lounge & Chill inevitably feels expensive, even if it does represent value for money; a slightly lower price point would surely yield more sales.
The construction kit format has its fans and its haters; if you’re the former then you’re in good hands here – the presentation is slick and the offering intuitive. If you’re the latter, you’ll want to break the kits apart, borrowing liberally from across the library to build your own unique arrangements. But if you really hate the format then I’d say walk on by: there’s just not enough ‘non-kit’ material here to warrant the price tag.
Finally, the collection feels a touch pedestrian. If you like Brazil Chillout and Satin Grooves (created by the same sound designers) then you’ll like this too – it’s more of the same. And it’s undeniably of a high quality. But I’d love to hear what the sound designers could do with a braver brief: to get their top-class players into a studio, record them with whacked-out old tape players, then recruit a couple of top-class beat programmers to blow the genre apart. (Although you’ll find a fair amount of programmed beats in the collection, it definitely feels more comfortable when the playing is real and the instrumentation organic: don’t expect any brooding programmed breaks or fractured 8-bit beatboxes here.) Overall, it would be nice if some of the kits looked forward rather than back.
That said, it is what it is, and what it does, it does well – albeit at a price. For those with the budget to invest, and a willingness to blow the kits apart, you’ll get a lot of use from the collection.