"...We found plenty of reasons to give Jungle Warfare a Key Buy award..."

"Hurt me, I'm liking this too much. Jungle Warfare is a non-stop feast of aggressive beats, ready for slicing, dicing, splicing, and adding icing. Volumes 2 and 3 of the series cover the same territory; in fact, the two CDs are formatted with exactly the same track layout and even the same number of samples per track. The materials are different, however, so you can buy both with (as far as I could tell from A/B comparisons) no overlap. Each CD has 50 tracks of beats - and a single track is not just a single two-bar loop. Instead, you get 16 bars or more, all of it jam-packed with variations.

Every two-bar phrase offers some new syncopation or turnaround on the beat; there are occasional chopped-up breaks and backward sounds, repeating sixteenths on hi-hat, and so on. The sheer mad variety has to be heard to be believed: Pick a track, snip out a few beats that you like, loop one, and use the others as fills - or grab a longer phrase for more of a manic groove. Most of the drum tracks contain only kick, snare, and hi-hat or ride, but each track gives you new drum sounds (big trashy kicks and sloppy ambience, little tight tappy kick and snare, etc.). A few are spiced up with multiple snares, flammed double hits, metallic bongos, or what-have-you. Tempos run the gamut from 161.5 to 168.5 bpm.

We found plenty of reasons to give Jungle Warfare a Key Buy award. For instance, the production is very solid sonically, with plenty of bottom and consistent levels. My only reservation (it's hardly strong enough to call a complaint, and those with limited sampler RAM or limited audio recorder track count may disagree ) is that most of the samples are monophonic. Once in a while you'll hear a snare echo panned hard left or something of the sort, but most of the mixes are dead center. That's where the kick and snare will end up in any case, but I felt a bit more could have been done to add variety.

"Both CDs have plenty of great loops," associate editor Greg Rule observed, "but Vol. 3 seems the more wicked of the two. With Vol. 2, one had to get pretty deep into the disc before I found the killer stuff. Vol. 3 comes right out swingin'." Each volume is rounded out with 34 additional tracks containing single drum hits, single bass notes, two-bar bass lines, ambiences, stabs, and assorted FX. Most of the bass lines are on fat synths, including some distorted 808 tones playing pitched lines. A few use upright bass, but they're clearly single-note samples that have been sequenced, not actual bass performances.

Aside from the bass lines and the drum tracks, there's nothing resembling complete phrases on Jungle Warfare, just a ton of samples with plenty of character (sirens, synth sweeps, duck calls, distorted electric piano, nature ambiences, echoing machine sounds, organ screams, a little of this and that). What you won't find are cutesy sci-fi and hip-hop vocal samples: These CDs are tightly formatted to give you just what you need for your rhythm tracks. As somebody once said, why get into a war if you're not going to fight to win?"