Dance eJay 2 (eJay)

Member Name: djfuq

Product:	eJay
Date:	17/02/01 (150 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some nice drum samples, good for kids

Disadvantages: No indepth editing at all

Where do I start? eJay's have been around for years. Ive tried them all. I even went out and bought Dance eJay 2 thinking it would be brilliant. How wrong I was. OK, at the time, when I first got it, I did like it. But within a week I realised how limited it is.

Heres a few examples:

You cant make your own samples within the program itself, you have to use one of the loops supplied. Well, unless you count the Groove Generator (which is crap).

All the synths and basslines etc come in 4 or 5 keys and are marked as such. This makes it a lot easier to find stuff that goes well with each other. But on the other hand it only allows you to create 4 or 5 tracks that wont sound the same, therefore making that end of the program very limited.

You are given a very sad excuse for a drum machine. This is in semi-quavers, quarters of a beat. Any attempt at making a buildup using this 'Groove Generator' will result in one of those cheesey, pop sounding slow buildups that are often found in the type of stuff that people who call house and trance rave listen to.

You only have 16 tracks to work with. It might sound like enough but it definitly isnt.

All the melodic samples are cheese nation.

You cant fade things in/out properly.

You cant add many effects to the samples. Eg, you are making a drum loop in the Groove Generator and you have a cymbal which doesnt go on long enough, so you want to add a bit of echo to it. So you do... Fair enough, you put you cymbals in and play it to see how it sounds. To your horror you discover that everything in your loop is now echoed, not just the cymbal. Major drawback.

eJays 140 BPM is actually 138BPM (this only affects DE2 if youre recording in samples via a different program).

You can only make tracks with a tempo of 120-160 BPM.

If you have your own samples that are not 140BPM, dont worry because the built in technology will automat
ically detect the BPM, and change it to 140BPM... Or so it says on the box. Their 'technology' is time stretching, i.e. instead of altering the pitch of the sample, keeps the sound the same but chages the speed. Its hard to explain. Anyway, this BPM changing stuff gets the BPM of the sample wrong 99% of the time, and when you time stretch the sample it sounds tinny and robotized.

Those examples are just a few of the flaws that Dance eJay 2 has. Dont get me wrong, Dance eJay 2 CAN be fun to mess around on, for a while. The details on the box make it sound brilliant, but if youre going to buy this to make music more than to simply have fun, youre wasting your money. I suggest you get yourself a copy of Music 2000 instead.

DJ Fuq
WWW.DJFUQ.COM

Summary: