Mr. Ferrone’s performances are tight, crisp and confident. He never drags or pushes the beat, but the resulting aural is not one of over-editing or quantization - it comes off as nothing more and nothing less than the work of an immaculately professional session drummer. True to the collection’s title, the sound is indeed big and robust. Greg Ladanyi’s mixes are excellently balanced, combining a clean sense of detail and nuance with a powerful, live sound.   

The collection is organized into 5 main folders: Jazz, Pop, R&B, Reggae, and Rock, each of which contains several subfolders of ‘songs.’ Each song is handily marked and (and it’s attendant files meta-tagged) with it’s BPM. Within each song folder can be found anywhere from 12-50 loops, including various beat variations, fills, intros, and outros. Let’s take one of the Rock songs - “Down & Dirty” - as an example. Locked in at 173 BPM, a full 44 loops explore variations of a driving rock beat at this tempo, including such variations at moving between hi hat, ride, and tom-based beats. There are also 6 intros and outros. On the other end of the spectrum, ‘Jazz Bossa Mover’ includes 14 loops. Each of these signify a very similar Bossa Nova feel, but provide significant and natural variation within the framework given.

This library contains a wide range of applications for producers and composers. Firstly and most obviously, they can be used categorized, adding a credible drum performance to an exercise in a given genre. The Reggae beats, in particular, would be well suited in this context. But on the other hand, the clean, straightforward nature of the performances also means that these tracks need not necessarily be used only in the context of the genres in which they are labeled; rhythms can and do transcend and cross genre and style all the time. For instance, I’m working on a mock-up of a variation on a theme for a TV score. In it’s original iteration, it’s a driving, neoclassical piece driven by piano and harp. For this variation, I experimented with sections of the “Bossa Mover” beat which syncopated compellingly with the right-hand rhythms of the piano. This quickly inspired the creation of a counter-line on the bass guitar, and an interesting variation was born. For me, it’s within a context such as this one that this library truly shines.

One highlight of the library is the ‘Ethnic Percussion folder’. This section of the library emphasizes intimate performances on hand-played drums: Djembe, Dumbek, Frame Drum, Java Drums, Slit Drum, Talking Drum, and Udu. The phrases played - while appropriate to the appropriate “world” rhythms associated with each drum - are short, clean and relatively simple. This approach should allow users a good amount of flexibility in chopping up/mixing and matching phrases and integrating these drums as texture in a wide variety of compositional styles. This section also includes some distinctive shaker sounds, including Seed Pods and Shaker Echo.

The library also shines in its organic textures, excellent for abstract sound design and embellishment of audio productions. The ‘Metal’ folder contains some lovely ones, from a small selection of gongs to a range of lovely Waterphone articulations, including a couple of eerie bowed effects. There are evocative sounds of a Metal Rod, along with various bells and chimes. Generally pitch less and abstract, these are fine raw materials that can be easily manipulated by producers via processing/pitch-shifting/time-stretching etc. to create new and interesting sounds and textures in their productions.

Elsewhere, some of this sort of post-processing has already been provided: The Drones and Abstract folder provides a series of novel, abstract drones. Highlights here include feedback loops, bell drones (bells expanded and stretched into long, drawn-out tones), and some loops actually made of the sound of slowly moving water. The ‘Synthetic Pulses’ folder offers manipulated sounds that have been structured to a rhythm and tempo.

Besides rhythm and texture, the library also features some melodic phrases:  The ‘Clean Flutes’ folder contains a series of short, melodic wind phrases, performed on various Occarinas, Bamboo Whistles, and Pan Pipes. The ‘Melodic’ folder offers short loops/phrases of rhythmic instrumental phrases that contain some simple melodic information. Instrumental phrases represented here range from the “World Music” (Marimba, Mbira) to the conventional (Marimba), to the novel and experimental (Flower Pot, Corning Bowl).

“Liquid Planet” is a carefully curated library, which, despite the highly specific musical pedigree of its creator, could prove to be of utility to composers and producers of varying backgrounds.