Discovery Sound Bom Dia Brazil - Sample CD: Bring some Samba to your sound with Discovery's Brazilian-themed sample CD

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Discovery Sound Bom Dia Brazil - Sample CD

Bring some Samba to your sound with Discovery's Brazilian-themed sample CD

You could be forgiven for thinking its all electronic music round these parts, given the focus of many of our reviews. Much of this is of course down to the inevitable bias towards digital sounds in computer-based music production, and the wealth of options available within the broader genre of electronic music production. The truth is, we love a bit of tropicalia at Laymans Reviews, and you're just as likely to hear a bit of Jorge Ben or Donato drifting from the office PCs.

With this in mind, we were rather taken with Discovery Sound's Bom Dia Brazil collection - a set of 16-bit, 44.1 kHz loops and samples drawing from a range of authentic sources and spanning a fair old selection of Brazilian music's rich cultural heritage.

Like other Discovery releases, the CD-ROM contains a set of both REX2 and Acidized WAV samples, each set containing sub-folders described in order as "Brazilian groove", "Cabacal style" (think carnival party sounds), the martial arts-derived "Capoeira", single instrument percussion loops, and the "Outtakes" folder, a set of aural interjections ideal for preventing productions from sounding too 'sequenced'. The folders then contain further groupings, drawing further on the diversity of the country's musical heritage with Carimbo loops, Maracatu sequences, and plenty of the more familiar Samba sounds. In most cases there are several loop variations ranging from full instrumental loops to simple percussion grooves.

The range of instrumentation is comprehensive, although the sounds of the instruments are more likely to be familiar to many ears than the names of the drums that made them. While this could frustrate users simply wishing to replicate their favourite Beck-like drum loop, it also serves as a useful crash-course in latin percussion recognition, and you'll probably know your talking drum from your berimbau in no time at all!

Summary

The fact that so many of these loops seem at once familiar and fresh is testament to how much the rhythms and sounds of Brazilian music have influenced contemporary music over the years. The collection also illustrates the passion and enthusiasm Discovery bring to their collections, and marking them out as a company with a real love for the music they draw from for their sample collections. This release couldn't be further removed from the likes of their 8-Bit Family releases for example, and the Discovery team could easily have turned out countless identikit synthetic production sounds.

If there is a criticism, it is in the structure and naming of the collection's sub-parts. The folders are all clearly named by style and genre, but this means an encyclopedic knowledge of the various types of Brazilian music is often required for anyone looking to quickly add a flavour of the favela to their productions. Tempo groupings would arguably have been more useful to casual users, making this collection less instantly usable than it could otherwise have been.

That aside, Bom dia Brazil is a comprehensive tour around some of the less well-travelled corners of Brazilian music, and well worth a place in anyone's sample collection.