Beat Rockerz by P5Audio Review

            Let me start by saying something that most people don’t know about me. Rap music was not my first love. My first love believe it or not was rock music, especially the grunge sound that was coming from Seattle in the early 90s. There’s something about a distortion pedal or an overdrive pedal going through a Marshall amp that just has greatness to it. Big, loud acoustic kicks and snares, and the brightness of crashes, splashes and hi hats resonate in a way that I would say is indescribable. The folks at P5Audio.com have taken those principals and rolled them into the new Beat Rockerz kit for your Maschine.

This kit is filled with stabs, bass riffs, and guitar riffs all in 18 Maschine ready kits. As you load each kit, you’ll notice each has a predetermined BPM making it easy to time stretch or base your track around that tempo. Each kit varies, but only slightly. While riffs and chops are preset on choke groups, it would have been nice if they were all made one shots as well. But that’s not a biggie as we can go in and change them ourselves. In some kits the bass and guitar hits are layered as one sample. Again, not bad, but I would have like to have seen bass and guitar all separated not only for chopping purposes, but maybe we’ll like to layer the guitar with an 808 instead? Not to mention, some of these guitar chops have crashes layered on them to, which I am not a fan of. I like that some of the riffs are for the most part separated so the ease of chopping is magnificent. This is an area I felt could have been widely improved.

There aren’t any kits separated strictly for drums in the Beat Rockerz kit. However, we are provided with the WAV files and we can build kits ourselves, but it would have been nice to have. There isn’t a huge variety of drums to speak of anyway. Many acoustic kicks, some layered with crashes, snares (also come layered with crashes) and hats are what we’d expect from a rock n roll based kit. We also find many fills in this kit that are like I mentioned earlier, set to a tempo. Feel free to use these as necessary.

Lastly, this kit features 6 Maschine ready instruments. All multi-sampled to perfection, we have 3 basses and 3 guitars. Upon loading into my Maschine Library, eagerly looking forward to loading and testing the sounds the dreaded “Missing Sample” appeared…. 39 times per sound! So after loading the multiple samples for each sound (234 times to be specific) using the map tab in the sampling menu, to get the sounds rolling, I was to be honest less than impressed with the sounds. All I could do sit with a frowny face.

At the end of the day, this kit has its positives and its negatives. Someone out there will love this kit, unfortunately, that person is not me. It has some sounds that I could find useable and many others will find usable. On a scale of 1-16 pads (1 being the lowest 16 being perfection), I’m going to rate this at 7 pads. You can pick up this kit at www.p5audio.com.

James Jaxin (@jaxin414)

Forum Moderator MaschineMasters.com

Product Review Specialist MaschineMasters.com