If you like multitrack loop collections and well-played grooves by great musicians, you’re going to love the Graybox Sessions Volume 2 Bundle. It’s from the relatively new loop developer Yurt Rock. The company is owned and run by Ryan Gruss, who formerly owned the Loop Loft before Native Instruments purchased it.
The bundle consists of six complete songs full of royalty-free loops in various genres, played by The Royal Pharaohs, who made their name as the backing band of the soul and funk artist Jamie Lidell. Yurt Rock recorded the tracks at Graybox Studios in Nashville.
The songs in the collection include a ’90s style hip-hop tune, a slow blues shuffle that goes way up in energy near the end and features a wild guitar solo, two funk songs, one fast and one slower, and an 85-bpm rock tune.
Each song contains 11 tracks: bass, guitar, kick in and out, snare top and bottom, tom, floor tom, hi-hat, overheads and room mic. Songs are organized into song sections with separate folders for intro, verse, chorus and so forth.
Every loop is the length of its song section, so all you have to do is drag and drop the tracks from a folder into your DAW, and you have the entire section ready to go. Having it organized like this is handy when you’re dealing with so many individual loops. If you need shorter ones, you can cut them up in your DAW.
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In addition to a Multitrack Loops folder, each song comes with preloaded sessions for Logic and Ableton Live. When you open one, not only do you get the entire song laid out across your DAW, but Yurt Rock already did a minimal mix with EQ and compression.”
The Logic sessions also contain bonus MIDI versions of the kick, and sometimes the snare, mapped to appropriate samples in Logic’s sampler. All the tracks are configured for Flex Time, so you can change the tempo and everything stays locked in.”
The Live versions are similar, except that you get the song sections laid out in the Session view. As a result, it’s easy to trigger song sections with the Scene buttons and customize the arrangement while recording it all into the Arrangement view. Nice!
It’s hard to go wrong with this collection. The musicianship has gobs of feel and the recording quality is excellent. What can you do with the loops? Because they’re royalty-free, you have carte blanche to use them in any way you like.
You could record your own tracks on top of the full arrangements or just grab sections or single instruments to use in other songs or load into samplers. The songs are also great for mixing practice, particularly the multitrack drums. The Graybox Sessions Vol 1 is also available as a bundle at the same price and has six more killer songs.”
