Review

The Spice Rack (PowerFX, 2008) collection of royalty free world music samples is meant to jazz up the electronic sounds of DJs and electronica musicians with global sounds. But this Swedish-produced collection of wave samples is also ideal for world music artists and home studio aficionados who want to add quality world music elements from far away lands.

The collection includes the always admired samples from Africa, including jembe, talking drum, mbira and much more. While there are a lot of samples of Latin and Brazilian beats in other collections, Spice Rack focuses on the music of some parts of the world that are lesser known. There is a package of Middle Eastern sounds that includes percussion such as darbuka, dumbek and fabulous belly dance beats. Other Middle Eastern instruments featured are the ney, kamenche and setar.

One of my favorites is the superb collection of Indian samples, which includes a large package of sitar melodies, tabla beats and much more. China is also well represented with the increasingly popular guzheng, pipa and the moon lute.

There are smaller sets that include Brazilian percussion and great samples of Australian didgeridoo.

World Loop Spice Rack is 890MB of sampled material and the download is 498MB compressed. To hear a demo, get a complete listing of instruments, or download the collection for $79 go to www.powerfx.com.