Sound on Sound Review

Pop music owes a huge debt to the rhythms of Africa, but despite the increasing popularity of African music, its instrumentation and musical structure remain something of a mystery. Sonic Network's new library throws light on the subject in the best possible way, giving users hits and grooves on a large number of African drums and percussion instruments. Atsi (meaning 'show off' or 'display') features the traditional drums, bells and shakers of the Ewe tribe of Ghana, collected by US percussion meister Joe Galeota. The Ewe instruments are supplemented by other West African percussion, plus a few extras from Brazil.

The library contains 25 drums of different shapes and sizes; tuneful kpanlogo and apentema hand drums, the forefathers of modern congas, perform a selection of conga-like open and muted hits, accents and slaps. A larger, floor-standing drum, the atsimevu, makes a deeper, more dominant sound, contributing a large variety of hand-to-skin hits and stick hits on the side of the drum. More familiar to some will be the djembe, African drum of choice for metropolitan buskers and hippy beach gatherings, firing off its usual deafening salvos of thumping bass tones and clanging high-pitched accents.

Other drums include the deep-toned sogo and boba, the smaller kaganu (played with long thin sticks), and Buddy Holly's favourite, the kpegisu. At the bottom end of the ensemble, dunumba and sangban bass drums, a Brazilian surdo, and the beautifully-named tamalen (a rectangular frame drum from Ghana) sound their deep, resonant low notes. African drummers sorted out their information technology a long, long time ago, so next time your email server goes down, pound out your messages on the library's dundun or tama talking drums instead. (You could even do your texting on Atsi's Nigerian log drums ? much more fun than poking about on a bleepy little mobile.)

As well as this cornucopia of drums, Atsi gives users a full complement of bells (but no whistles), providing deftly performed samples of five pairs of gankogwe (aka 'agogo') bells, toke bells and frikywa (an iron mini-bell played with a metal thumb ring). It also offers a versatile selection of shakers, including the Brazilian afoxe, Ghanaian axatse, shekere and caxixi, and good old maracas, probably the world's best-selling percussion instrument. In addition to the single hits, there are a large number of one-bar four/four and six/eight rhythm loops, played on the individual instruments at various tempos. Grouped together into groove menus, these loops are designed to be layered, creating an endless array of wonderful interlocking patterns. Lots of fun, and instructive too.

The samples, brilliantly recorded with a very classy room ambience, really leap out of the speakers. Even played by an unfunky European dude like myself, programmed grooves sound almost unnervingly 'live' and realistic, partly because many of the drums were sampled at three or four dynamic levels, but also because the hits are authentically played and musically well-chosen. The keyboard layout is also very helpful, intelligently dividing the drum hits into 'weak hand' and 'strong hand' hits mapped in adjacent octaves ? perfect for two-handed programming.

Offering about 420MB of samples, Atsi is a specialised library, but its colourful percussion textures and infectious grooves will appeal to a wide audience. I can strongly recommend it for its sounds alone, but I was impressed by its detailed documentation (unfortunately, supplied only as a PDF file), the most interesting and erudite explanation of African drums and percussion I've yet seen. All in all, a great introduction and a useful auditory guide to a fascinating, sophisticated rhythmic world. Dave Stewart

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