Reflect by Bedroom Producers Blog
As a sound designer, I've made a habit of only using my own creations, but in the last few years, I've become more and more convinced that this is a bad habit. Only using your own sounds can bring on a creative drought, where you'll find yourself growing more and more out of touch with your audience and your peers, struggling to produce anything that truly inspires you. That's because it's not your job to inspire you. By consuming third party content, you'll open yourself up to new ideas and possibilities that fuel the creative process.
I'm really finicky when it comes to shopping for samples and preset libraries. I find it extraordinarily difficult to get excited about the same ole' hackneyed bread and butter sounds that have flooded the market for decades, but every once in a great while, I discover something so wonderfully original, I stop and take notice.
In this special case, Reflect by Mode Audio has garnered my undivided attention, featuring 120 loops, 43 one-hit drum samples and 36 MIDI sequences. The result is a shimmering example of ambient chillwave and downtempo style grooves and percussive elements intertwined with warm, wide pads and ice cold drones, otherworldly sound effects, scintillating leads and deep basslines rich with ultra-low frequency content.
The Review
With exception of the MIDI sequences and drum samples, the folder structure offers seven loop libraries: Basslines, Chords, Drones, Drums, Leads, Other and SFX. Sample groups are indicated by the title of each WAV file, with tempo and pitch information, which makes it all the more easy to layer them within your DAW just to give you a general idea of how you can use them within your own projects later on down the road.
The most impressive assortment of loops are the Drums, offering a handsome variety of minimal dub style breaks and percussions, skillfully mixed to perfection. But don't worry, there's plenty of ambience on hand. Both the Chords and Drone libraries include beautiful harmonies and dissonant pads and atmospheres that gel nicely with the drums, and of course with the Leads and Bass sounds, which are also quite exceptional.
I was surprised by the generous supply of filter sweeps and experimental noise snippets available in the Other and SFX folders, which also contain some brilliant arpeggios and fluttering gated sequences. I usually don't have much use for third-party loops like these, but in this rare instance, I can see myself getting a lot of mileage out of them within sample mashers and loop layering plugins.
The one shot drum samples are no exception. Subtlety is key. Downtempo style music is made to chill you out; there's no need for excessive, pile-driving sounds that punch you hard in the chest. Here, we're going for a simple, modest groove. No need for theatrics. So, we'll be needing simple, modest sounds. The kicks are nice and warm without being utterly devoid of life while many of the snares employ the use of gated reverb, which is also true with the claps and also the rims, cymbals and hi-hats.
I do wish I could say more positive things about the MIDI loops, which appear to have been made within samplers with key zones triggering one-hit samples that aren't always available in the aforementioned folder, so I end up having to cut and paste the MIDI note data from one piano roll to another. Of course, it's not the end of the world, but I'm afraid I just don't have much use for these files.
The Verdict
On the whole, Reflect is a worthy inclusion to your sample library. There are so many house and trance style EDM packs saturating the market with an endless strain of overly repetitive and painfully unoriginal sounds, so it's always a breath of fresh air when something else eventually crops up. If you're looking for something new, something special, and most importantly, something inspiring, then perhaps you should give this a try.
Score
CONTENT QUALITY: 4.5/5
LIBRARY ORGANIZATION: 5/5
PRICING: 4.5/5
Overall score: 93%