Paul Ireson lends an ear to two dance-orientated sample CDs from Time & Space.

The Zero G Datafile sample CDs — there are currently two in the series, with one more to follow — offer a range of samples aimed fairly and squarely at anyone involved in creating dance music, which by its very nature is perhaps the most sample-hungry genre we have. The origins of the discs are promising, as they've been created by Ed Stratton, better known as half of Jack'n'Chill, and more recently Man Machine.

Datafiles One and Two contain fairly similar material; what you get is two different selections from the same basic categories rather than two totally different CDs. This is probably a good thing, as you don't have to buy both in order to get a good idea of what's on offer from Zero G; buy one, and if you like it, you'll know that the second is right up your street. If you're not so impressed, you know that the second isn't so different that it's worth buying on spec. There is, incidentally, a small amount of duplication between the two, but nothing to worry about given that each contains around 1,000 different samples; both CDs are about an hour long.

Both volumes start off with a healthy selection of breakbeats, both live and programmed. You should recognise at least a handful of them, but equally there are plenty that you won't unless you have an unusually encyclopaedic knowledge of dance music. The selections are best suited to house and techno styles — hardcore hip hoppers are going to be disappointed, but the discs therefore benefit from offering more variety within that area.

Breakbeats are followed by single drum samples (actually, each is recorded twice, so you can audition a sound and set a level, then sample it; all other sounds are recorded only once, to save space). Datafile One has 808, 909, 727 samples, Datafile Two goes for R8 and HR16B, and both include a great selection of unnamed kicks, snares and percussion.

Beyond percussion, the discs concentrate on vocal snatches: sung hooks from records, snippets of dialogue from sci-fi movies and TV (Ed must have an interesting video collection, judging by the 'sex gasps' section), and original vocal hooks. The latter type are either vocoded or speech synthesised ("transmit sequence data" and so on), or original versions of the kind of hooks you'd lift from your favourite tracks.

Synth sounds are also here a-plenty: house synth basses galore, plus a selection of pads, loads of effects, and there are even some very useful guitar samples (riffs and breaks of course, rather than single notes) on Datafile Two. The effects cover everything from simple analogue blips to the kind of outrageous patches you can only create with some pretty heavy modulation, to a few sounds from the natural world (eg. whale song) and lifts from films (sci-fi, as if you need ask). Levels are closely matched across samples, so you should be able to set your sampler input level once, then not touch it again for as long as you're sampling from the Datafile CDs (although as you'd expect, quieter percussion sounds such as hi-hats won't actually push your meters as high as the kicks; if they did, you'd only have to turn the sample volume down once you'd transferred the sound to your sampler).

"The breakbeat selections are best suited to house and techno styles — hardcore hip hoppers are going to be disappointed, but the discs therefore benefit from offering more variety within that area."

The choice of sounds is good, with some first-rate basses and aggressive patches which should really cut through. A few of the synth sounds do suffer, however, from looped sustain sections at the very end which are anything but smooth, but having said that the problem was only apparent on short bass sounds that you probably wouldn't sustain, and if you did you'd have to create your own loop anyway, whether the loop on the original was smooth or not (the bass note samples are generally pretty short).

The Datafile CDs provide the samplist with all the raw material needed to assemble house or techno tracks to a very high standard. Of course, part of the art of choosing samples for dance music is to pick new material to work into your own. On the one hand the selection of new material is rewarding, but it's also very time consuming, and the Datafiles put a lot of instantly usable breakbeats, vocal and speech snatches, and synth sounds at your fingertips. Personally I found there were rather too many predictable vocal hooks along the "get funky" and "everybody get down" lines, and lifts from films really need to be personally chosen rather than handed to you on a plate (I can place the exact scene of the spaghetti western where that gunshot comes from - minor point, I know).

Also, I recognised rather too many of the vocal hooks for my liking. Having said that, 90% of us are not going to put the effort into assembling a library that's even mostly original, and given Ed Stratton's ear for what works, the Datafile CDs are a near-essential purchase if dance music's your game.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Zero G Datafiles One & Two £49.95 each.

Time And Space, (Contact Details).