When it comes to dance music in its most popular, commercial form, German sound designers Vengeance are some of the hottest kids on the block. Their collaboration with ReFX and the hugely popular dance synthesizer Nexus have pushed their fame into the big audience and now Vengeance are popping out sample libraries about two-three times per year with their latest take on the current temperature on the dance scene.

Although their sample libraries targets the commercial side of electronic dance music, and although you can spot a typical Vengeance product a mile away, the different libraries vary quite a lot. From the softer side of the spectrum, there are the Essential House libraries - to the much harder Essential Club Sounds series. Electro Essentials vol 2 is their latest library and places itself somewhere in the middle.

By the numbers
Electro Essentials vol 2 is a collection with 500 megabyte data spanning over almost 2500 audio files. Like with other sound libraries from Vengeance the structure remains the same - the files are 16 bit, 44.1 kHz and are sorted into folders such as bass drums, claps, snares, loops, effects and synth. No, wait. Let's do it really by the numbers here...

Bass drums: 460
Claps: 200
Cymbals (hats, crashes and rides): 350
Effects: 150
Drum loops: 401
Melody loops: 56
Percussion: 300
Real recordings: 50
Snares: 200
Synths: 261

Total single drums: 1510
Total looped drums: 401
Total loops: 457
Total synth/effects/melodic sounds: 517
Total drums: 1911

Total sounds: 2428

If you have any other Vengeance sample library - or any other sample library for that matter - you are probably already in serious overload when it comes to electronic drums. Some say you never can have too many kick drums, but in my personal experience, I believe you can. It's never an inspiring task to wade through hundreds or even thousands of booming kicks when your inspiration is desperately trying to drive you forward.
This is naturally not Vengeances fault. It's just how things are. Drums are an essential part of modern dance music and Electro Essentials give you what you need.

(As a side note. To speed up production, I would seriously recommend you mark up your favourite sounds with a good sample librarian. Sample Tagger is my personal weapon of choice - unfortunately only available for PC but works great with Parallels Desktop for OS X).

The samples
The Holy Grail when producing dance music these days is to get the sound loud. There are many tricks and tools to create loudness – equalizers, compressors and layering of samples. Vengeance masters all tricks very well and use their knowledge to their full extent in their sample libraries. In other words, these sounds are processed with the capital letter P.

The kicks span from weak and minimalistic to the massively boomy and hard – but without going into the distorted madness of gabber-land. Many of the available kicks also have other elements in them, such as rimshots, hihats or low sub basses. While kicks layered with high frequency elements such a hihat, is by some is regarded as a nuisance, there is a deeper purpose behind this, and not the result of sloppy work. By adding short snippets of hihats or even longer parts of a crash cymbal - you drastically change the character of the kick. It's not unlike the principle of the Linear Arithmetic synthesis found in the old Roland D50 - as the most important part of any sound is the attack, you can create the illusion of a different sound by adding a small fragment of attack.

If my memory serves me right, electronic artist Akufen explores this technique a lot.

With Electro Essentials you get the whole lot. Everything from kicks layered with kicks, and kicks layered with rimshots, all the way to kicks layered with hihats and even fragments of crash cymbals. The only bad thing about this is that if you're not a fan of the kick/hihat combo you'll have to go through all 460 sounds when you are looking for a cleaner kick. Although, you can easily filter out the high frequency attack with an eq - I think it would be a nice service of Vengeance to sort the sounds for us. They already sorted out some of the deeper kicks and put them in a sub folder - so why not the kick/hihats as well?

The layering of sounds reaches its extreme when it comes to the claps. Just because there are 200 claps in the clap folder, doesn't mean you'll be getting 200 claps. You’re not. There are many claps here that have been so deeply buried in layers that you no longer can hear the original clap. They have evolved into snares. Deeply confused about this I had to let Manuel Schleis explain the concept for me. Both the snares folder and the claps folder contains sounds that are intended to be used on the second and fourth kick - but the clap folder contains sounds that are more "clapish".
Although this structure have been used by Vengeance since 2004, for me this logic causes some confusion. If I am looking for a clap, I am looking for a sound that sounds like a clap – not a sound that was, sometime in the beginning of man, dinosaurs and audio, once where a clap but has now been gobbled up by a really loud snare. Again, I would find it useful if the sounds would be sorted into cleaner type of layering and heavier type of layering. That way the search of sounds would go much more rapid.

The effects section mainly consists of bombastic impacts, hitech squelches and uplifting sweeps that goes on forever. The processing here really reveals the cunning of Vengeance. Their trademark sound – the long reverb tail with holes cut out by a side chain compressor is all over the place – and after all these years, it still sounds damn cool. Although hard processed sounds such as these can pose problems during production (the delays are burned into the actual audio file) – this is one of the highlights of Electro Essentials 2. The stuff here will most definitely breathe dynamic movement and excitement into any productions.

The loops are in the Vengeance standard tempo of 128 BPM and are the sort without kicks. It's important to underline that the loops are kick-less because they are programmed that way – it's not the kind of cheap loop-passed-though-a-hipass-filter style of loops. The style is quite relaxed – at least when you compare them with the Blasters-Set-To-Vaporize loops of the Essential Club Sounds series. We talk about calm hihat loops, ride patterns, laid back eight-bit percussion style loops and also classic electronic stuff in the spirit of the Roland TR-808. The loops are quite short. As usual with two-four seconds long loops is that they render themselves invisible after a while of continuous playing - so some further work on them are sometimes necessary. But since the loops aren't saturated with sounds – this is not a problem. Compared with the “instant gratification”-loops of their Club sounds – these sounds are more mature and more useful in the long run. A little less wow – but more worthwhile.

The percussion section contains sounds that works great for use as percussive elements. There are of course the usual suspects here, such as congas, shakers, cow bells – but there are also some cool synth bass sounds intended to be used as a flavor in your percussion.
The real recordings section is an odd addition where you can find sounds recorded by a real microphone of real things. Here you can find sounds of scissors, doors slamming, melody boxes. If you are a sound designer with a penchant for real-world samples – there are some useful stuff here.

Always when Vengeance release a new sample library I'm most curious about the synth section. If you hate using the pre made bass/melodic loops, this is the place where you find your building blocks. Bass sounds, stabs, reverse vocals, hoovers, orchestral/guitarish stabs. The sounds here does not disappoint in any way. They’re not breaking any new ground, but they feel fresh. Even older classical sounds have been processed with a new dimension of freshness.

In 2008, Vengeance split with their distributor Mutekki Media and Vengeance are now selling their sounds themselves. They quit making CDs and all libraries are now in form of digital downloads, which I think is a good thing. While the existence of DVDs still is valid - CD as a medium for sample libraries have run its course.

Apart from the actual contents, I can't help but feeling a little puzzled by these guys. On one hand, they are standing there, at the very front line of popular dance music - always spot on. On the other hand Vengeance are a conservative lot. While trends come and go like the seasons of the year - Vengeance is doing what they always been doing. Without changing One. Tiny. Bit.
When the industry trend goes packaging all your samples in VST-plugs such as Kontakt, or pre-chopped loops in Rex-format, or What-Ever-The-Fashion-Is-This-Month, Vengeance are happy with their 16 bit WAV files in 128 BPM.

I like this. Sample libraries locked with softwares such as the Kontakt Player or the Uebershall Elastik engine almost always ends up with problems for the end users. Is there any real need for 24 bits for a library with electronic sounds? Of course, the dynamics are by far better in 24 bits, but does that really matter? And now I am not even taking in the fact that the dynamics will go out the door anyway during the Square-Waveform mastering process.

My criticisms regarding Electro Essentials 2 are two. First of all, I find that the general trend these days is that sound libraries these days is that they all are so damn heavy on the drums. Vengeance is no exception. Now, while drums are fundamental of electronic dance music - the bass comes as a good second. While there are many encounters of great bass sounds within Electro Essentials vol 2 - they are too few according to my taste. I mean… the library is called Electro Essentials – right? Not Electro Drum Essentials. More balance, please.

Due to the various levels of layering, finding the right kick, snare and clap is not the easiest thing. The sounds are there - all with its punch and attitude. But when you're in the middle of a creative session the last thing you want to do is to scan through 400+ kick drums in search for the right one.

Soundwise, Vengeance is again hitting the nail straight on the head with Electro Essentials 2. It lacks the oh-my-gawd instant gratification feeling of some of their other libraries, but I think it's more usable in the long run - more mature so to speak.