Groove Shadow Elastik
Keys, April 2008
www.keys.de


Some years ago Ueberschall produced a CD-ROM with Add-On and percussion loops under the name „Groove Shadows“. Nevertheless the new Groove-Shadow-Library comes for the Elastik-Player, the plugin is also on the DVD. If you‘ve already installed it once it is enough to copy the 3.5 GB library to your hard drive and register it in the player.

The library is well structured. On the one hand categorized in tempo, which can be easily changed with the help of Elastik. On the other hand separated into „lite“, „medium“ and „hard“.
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Each loop is seperated into low frequency, two mid freuency and one high frequency loop. In this way you can support different parts of a drum loop directly. Either kick, snare or hihat and cymbals.
The single loops are way easier to integrate into your existing material as the complete main-loop.
Groove Shadows consists mainly out of synthetic and modified sounds.

A lot of the material is reminding on „Clicks&Cut“ or Industrial music. But this is not the group of Groove Shadow users at all. The loops can also be used to enrich black-music, dance- or pop-songs. The soundscape, formed with filter, distortion, multi-FX and granulizing is very homogeneous. If you like this sound you‘ll find a huge amount of useable samples on Groove Shadow Elastik - if not you won‘t.

Groove Shadow Elastik
Sound On Sound, January 2008
http://www.soundonsound.com/

This new library from Ueberschall pumps some new life into one of their legacy
product concepts: Groove Shadows. The original Groove Shadows CD sample library
contained a selection of abstract rhythmic textures designed to be used as layers to
support your main drum programming, rather than standing on their own. Two groups
of Groove Shadows were targeted at more foreground and background use, and a
selection of different common tempos was provided to suit different projects. I found
the background layers, in particular, really useful in my own music
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You get more than 430 different presets in Groove Shadow Elastik, each providing a
mixed loop, as well as (typically) four isolated layers - electively a construction kit -
and a handful of the most characteristic one-shot samples for adding quick
programming touches. This is an enormous amount of material, going far beyond the
scope of the original Groove Shadows CD, and the carefully reconstructed elements
work in tandem with Elastik Player's beat-slicing routine to offer phenomenal
flexibility when it comes to fitting the samples around pre-existing arrangements -
which is the raison d'etre here, after all. The only thing I pined for were some quick
'loop menu' presets, placing only the mixed loops on adjacent keys for auditioning
purposes.
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To cut a long story short, I'm glad to report the Groove Shadow Elastik is bigger,
better, and lots more usable than its Audio CD forebear, and I don't hesitate to give
it five stars - I'll certainly be using it to death!
Mike Senior

Groove Shadow Elastik
Sound & Recording, 09-2007
www.soundandrecording.de


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I don‘t want to call them „instruments“ because the sounds are by definition undefinable: Groove Shadows don‘t have to play in the front but work well behnd usual drumgrooves or as mysterious Rhythmbed. They consist out of Noise-Samples, processed machine- or instrumentsounds and synthesizer effectsounds. The Grooves do not come dry either, most of them already include Reverb, Delay and different modulations. Each Groove is to be seen as an artwork on its own. The field of application is wide spreaded: electronic music in general, ambient, film- and computergamemusic, commercials and jingles.
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Groove Shadow Elastik
Remix Magazine, June 2007
http://www.remixmag.com/


Devoted entirely to polyrhythmic backdrops to layer behind your main beat, Groove Shadow Elastik is filled with abstract effects loops, stretched circuit-bends and atmosphere-based sequnces.
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Shadows are categorized by light, medium and hard intensities, which sounds cool in theory because it allows you to approach your groove-building dynamically. But in practice, those guidelines aren't very well executed and had lots of false alarms and misappropriation.
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The Elastik player's "loop eye" interface proved to be the ideal host for such a library.
Layers and elements can be individually filtered, panned, reversed, ptich-shifted, time-stretched or sent to separate outputs. By adjusting the start and end loop-points, I was able to mesh whole elements or partial sections together in perfectly locked time. You can even auto-splice elements down to a granular level with the
results mapped across the keyboard when you're feeling all Aphex Twin-like. Groove Shadow Elastik feels as much at home for film and game composers as it should be for triggering live during performances or DJ sets.

Jason Scott Alexander

Groove Shadow Elastik
Musician‘s Life, Juni 2007
http://www.musicianslife.de


Here comes some more food, 3.4 GB separeted into two files. 16 categories with 27 construction kits and 25 loops (all in all 1600) each. A lot of possibilities. In this case we are talking about percussion loops, not construction kits.
The quality is good through the whole library. The first key always keeps the whole loop. The following keys keep single percussion lines and single elements of the whole loop. (...)
The sound is a mixture of chaos-, industrial, and noise-elements. It takes its time to find the suiting samples. Therefore Groove Shadow Elastik is good to score movies or videogames.
Sometimes the perfect dynamic is missing to let a groove stay on its own but that‘s not the idea that Groove Shadow is made for. It is made to support the main beat and this is working very well.
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Those who are looking for new sounds should test this library at the audio dealer they trust.