Review: Expeditions by Sample Logic (currently 70% OFF)

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Expeditions offers a ton of high quality loops in all kinds of genres through an overwhelmingly flexible engine.

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Jump to the Demos of Expeditions by Sample Logic

 

 

Review: Expeditions by Sample Logic

Expeditions is a powerful tool for quick and flexible rhythmic composition. With loops based on performances in many genres and from many parts of the world, this library can be a lifesaver for a composer or producer looking to add some specific rhythmic flair to their work. The vast amount of loops paired with Sample Logic’s 4-core Rhythm engine gives us a deadly combination, if not a tad overwhelming when diving in. While Expeditions has its flaws, it’s undeniably an incredibly useful arsenal of performances whether you’re looking for a quick rhythmic hi-hat loop, an African polyrhythm, a dance synth sequence, or anything in between.

Expeditions normally sells for $299 from Sample Logic

Thoughts

Sample Logic’s 4-core Loop engine is a bit of a commitment to dive into. There’s a lot of tools in here and they can be overwhelming.

The main panel is where you do the simpler chopping, mangling, and sculpting of your loop sources. Each of the four rows represent a different loop source/core. The waveforms of the loops are visible and you can see how they are divided into slices which can be toggled on or off with the big colored squares. You can reorder the slices using the numbers below the colored squares as well. The left side of the rows is where you can turn the various cores on or off, reverse them, open the FX menu, alter step counts, choose new loop sources, and more. Clicking the Mix/Master toggle button at the top left opens this:

Where you can mix each core’s channels and apply master FX to the final output. These FX are different to those you can access by clicking the FX button on each core in the main panel.

This expands the core to show a lot more step sequencers – one for each effect. Here you can animate various insert FX in a similar fashion to how you edit the loop sources themselves. There are a variety of presets for the presets as well. The “Multi Instrument Name” button at the top opens the browser for presets that use all 4 cores.

This is a pretty good browser system overall. You can click to highlight any of the tags, which then filters the results on the right to only include options with all of your selected tags. It works fairly well, but I have two problems with it. I wish there were tags for time signatures, as it can be annoying having to guess and look for a loop that fits your meter by default. I also think some of the sounds have too many tags. By highlighting “drum kit” I get lots of presets that only include the tiniest hint of a drum kit, so I have to filter through those manually to find ones that are more heavily kit based. It’s a minor quibble, but that time can really add up when writing large volumes of music. This problem only really exists with the multi-core instrument presets – for the single loops, it’s much easier to tag them appropriately.

Every loop/sample I’ve encountered in Expeditions has been very high quality, and there are a lot of them. It’s difficult to talk specifically about the sound when there are so many loops of different styles, but as a whole I have no complaints about the sonic quality.

I’m personally a fan of the non-tonal percussion loops, as they are the easiest to implement into a track without being too recognizable. But there is definitely a use for the tonal loops if you’re a working composer/producer who needs to be able to write large volumes of music in many genres.

Despite the name and theme of this library, there is a surprising amount of electronic and hybrid elements packed in along the more primitive and traditional performances, which is excellent. With the tag based browser including region/country tags, it’s fairly easy to navigate to the correct sound for your needs. I’d wager that no matter what style of music you’re working on, you could find some very useful material in Expeditions.

Facts

Expeditions is built on Sample Logic’s 4-core Loop Engine and 965 loops. Each loop is tagged with appropriate genre data, including 64 total tags/categories for easy curation. All of this content brings the library to 1.5 GB installed.

Expeditions requires the full retail version of Kontakt 5.7 or higher, and is available at https://www.samplelogic.com/products/expeditions/ for $299.

Expeditions normally sells for $299 from Sample Logic

 

Demos of Expeditions by Sample Logic

Videos of Expeditions by Sample Logic

 

Contributor Steven McDonald reviews Expeditions by Sample Logic
“Expeditions offers a ton of high quality loops in all kinds of genres through an overwhelmingly flexible engine.”