Review: Sample Logic Electro City Kontakt Library

After only a few minutes with Electro City I knew it was something special. Each preset felt robust, while remaining clean, and overflowing with life and energy. While the name might suggest a heavy focus on electro house, it is not the case. What I found was a wide range of musical variety that is sure to please any musical tastes. 

I was already familiar with Sample Logic’s Rhythmology so getting right into the GUI was a breeze as the both use the same internal engine. 

 

By the Numbers

Electro City comes stacked with 1,800 sound presets. Add to that Sample Logic’s incredible sound mangling and manipulation engine and you have endless possibilities. There are 1,010 loop sources, 487 loop cores and 325 multi-core instruments packed into a 1.75 GB Kontakt library, which uses lossless compression, so in reality you are getting 5 GB of sounds sampled at 44.1kHz/24-bit!

The Main Event

The main page is where the 4 loop cores are positioned and a lot of the arranging takes place. Each loop core has a staggering amount of control right from the main page. There is the core browser where you can cycle through the core presets which come with everything already dialed in, like effects and slice playback style. Below that there is a place to change the loop source. That way you can keep the cores settings, but just change the sounds running through the engine. GENIUS! 

The step sequencer grid has a ton of further control. Each loop is sliced into 16 bars (or less). Then you can choose to activate or deactivate on a slice by slice basis. Not only that, but the numbers in white below the slice activation button correspond to the step sequencer number and they too can be changed independently. If you want to first step in the sequence to play the 9^th slice you just need to change the one to a nine and you’re good to go!

Each of the cores has its own key on the keyboard and there is a 5^th key that triggers all four cores at the same time. Not only that, but you can add more pages of the same cores to create variations for things like breakdowns and fills!

Mind Melting Effects Control

One of my favorite things about Electro City is the ability to add effects slice by slice. You can adjust anything you can imagine for each slice, in fact. Volume, pan, transpose, stutter, and reverse. Then you can add up to 6 more unique and powerful effects on top of that! You can find filters, saturators, cabinets, stereo spread, delay, phaser, reverb, pitch shift, chorus and more. There are also a number of grouped effects presets to choose from as well to get things cracking quickly. It is really easy to discover inspiration once you get into the effects page and start tweaking!

Specific Randomization!

Another one of my favorite things about Electro City is the randomize features scattered throughout the instrument. These features coupled with outstanding audio content makes for generating new, unique and high-quality ideas at the press of a button. Not only that, but you can specify what you want to randomize or change everything!

Conclusion

I’m more than impressed with Electro City. The sheer number of high quality loops that come in the package was enough to make me interested. Those, paired with Sample Logic's engine for creating ideas, pushed me well into the realm of mind-blown-ness. I am a control freak and the ability to control each loop on a slice by slice basis is perfect for someone like me, while the randomize features helps to generate ideas and get inspiration quickly. What’s not to like?

If you are looking for the future of sample pack libraries Sample Logic’s Electro City is the starting point and the future looks bright and sounds great!