Minimal Techno

Minimal Techno
Beatportal.com,

by Beatportal.com

Minimal Techno
Beatportal.com,
February 2008
www.beatprotal.com

Veteran sample developer Ueberschall has released a new sample package entitled Minimal Techno. The sounds run on Ueberschall’s Elastik engine which allows for timestretching and pitchshifting right out of the box. They were crafted by Asem Shama and they tally up to 1200 sounds and loops across 1.6 Gigs.
(...) The software is Mac and PC compatible featuring VST, AU and RTAS versions. Last month at the 2008 NAMM show, Ueberschall released Minimal House which was produced by Christian Quast. I’m sure many people scoff at sample libraries that get released alongside trends in the industry, but if the demand is there then it’s these company’s jobs to make them. And in the case of these specific libraries, they were made by people who actually release tracks of this nature already, and not some random producer’s interpretation of how this style gets broken down. I feel like it’s a good thing as long as the libraries are well produced and they live up to the genre printed in the title. I myself am curious to try these out as i’m sure there are some useful sounds in them.
http://www.beatportal.com/feed/item/ueberschall-goes-minimal/

Minimal Techno
Future Music,
July...

by Future Music

Minimal Techno
Future Music,
July 2008
www.futuremusic.co.uk

Ueberschall brings you 75 construction kits, 1200 loops and samples including drums, basses, leads, pads and one shots. However what makes this stand out is the famous Elastik Loop player.
This can run as a stand-alone or you can use it as VST instrument. Either way you are able to load up different batches or kits from the soundbank and have a great deal of fun. Particularly interesting is the Loopeye, a feature where the waveform of the loop is pictured in a circle like a clock face and makes tweaking the start and end points a lot easier to my mind.
You also get to play with time-stretching, pitch-shifting and filtering. Once you’ve got your head round the workings of the player this is a great tool.
Rating 9/10

Minimal Techno
DJ Mag,
June 2008...

by I-DJ

Minimal Techno
DJ Mag,
June 2008
http://www.i-dj.co.uk/

(...) Minimal is still a big buzzword, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that Ueberschall have jumped on a rickety old bandwagon. But where other software companies have thrown together a meagre set of low-quality lo-fi glitchiness and pump it out with the m-word in the title, this is something very special. (...) The Elastik interface opens a window containing a set of concise controls and the distinctive ‘LoopEye’ viewer – a circular clock-face style visual display of each wave- form. Various buttons and sliders can be used to control high-speed time-stretching, pitch-shifting, filter and mapping tools. After auditioning and tweaking a sample, you can then choose to bounce down the original or your customised version as a wav file into your arrangement. Although most of us already have all these functions available to us as part of various other VST’s such as Halion, the audio engine that comes dedicated to Elastik gives some added flexibility which makes the process quicker and less memory-intensive. (...) Produced by Asem Shama they are all solid and of the high-quality you’d expect from Ueberschall. The great kick drum sounds could be worth the spend on their own, and will easily find their way into anything from electro to hip-hop. With genres bending and styles blending across the spectrum of electronic music, this flexibility could be what every producer needs.
Verdict
Sound Quality: 19/20 Build Quality: 20/20 Ease of Use: 17/20 Value for Money: 17/20 Feature set: 19/20
iDJ Rating: 92%
A virtual instrument with plenty of loop-manipulating tools and a versatile collection of sounds, make this much more than just a collection of samples.