As a guitar player, I like to have a pounding drum beat behind behind my rock guitar riff. The trouble is, I’ve found most drum loops to be—to put it diplomatically—dissatisfying. The heck with being diplomatic—most sound pretty lame, to my ears anyhow.
Thankfully, Beta Monkey Music’s recent release of the $30 Double Bass Mania II has solved the problem of all of the lame sounding drum loops that I’ve tried to use in the past. With Double Bass Mania II offering everything from grooves to fills in many tempos, I can find a collection of loops to build a song in no time. I have even gone back to some of my old songs and added more elaborate drum grooves and breaks.
And using Double Bass Mania II—which contains more than 800 original, license-free drum loops and drum/cymbal samples in Apple Loop format—seems to have paid off. I got together recently with a new singer and played a song I wrote to see what he thought. He loved it. “Who’s playing the drums?” he asked. And this isn’t someone who’s new to recording—he’s been singing for about 20 years and recorded in the studio before, so he knows his stuff. It was priceless to see the look on his face when I told them they were loops.
To be fair, it is a real drummer playing Doube Bass Mania II’s loops. Specifically, his name is Chris Donlon, who’s not only the owner of Beta Monkey Music but also plays the drums on the loops.
Chris goes into the studio, sets up the drum kit and mics it the ways he wants depending on the type of loops he is recording. He plays what will become the loops, and then the engineer and Chris start going through everything, picking what will end up on the disk.
It’s not a speedy process, but the end result is well worth the wait. While the Double Bass Mania series is my favorite, Chris does everything from Blues to Country.