In recent years, more and more progressive DJs and producers have turned to Indian instruments to spice and fatten their beats. Leading the way in these endeavors of Indian electronic fusion are Talvin Singh and Karsh Kale, both of whom used authentic Indian percussionists to anchor electronic soundscapes and produce pounding rhythms with endless bass in projects including Tabla Beat Science. So what happens if you can't simply call up Zakir Hussain to play on your next recording? Easy answer: make an order to Swar Systems.

With the newly released edition of Swar Plug, producers and DJs can access hours of midi loops of over 74 Indian instruments. That means musicians can dial-in grooves from tabla maestros (including percussion master Pandit Anindo Chatterjee's samples) and improvise/compose around them or, for the more industrious few, actually use the samples to create your own rhythmic patterns stroke by stroke. For players who can't use VST plug-ins, SwarTrax features the same loops in sampler formats including Akai S1000, Motif or Reason NN-XT. These are samples from real instruments, with musicians from Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore playing instruments including the tudd, duff and israj.

The good news is that there are over 1,000 programmable MIDI samples of the instruments. The bad news is that some of the melodic instruments with little attack (sarangi) or unique attack (sarod) can be more than a little cheesy/ fake sounding. Still, there is nothing else on the market that will give access to authentic Indian rhythm sounds and the drum patches are rarely less than pristine. At $260 for SwarPlug and $470 for the entire package that includes SwarShala (which lets a user create fully customized practice sessions with the required instruments, cycles, pitch, tempo, acceleration, etc.), the price of entry is a little steep, but for anyone looking for a good way to diversify their sound or further understand Indian music, the product is easily recommended.

http://www.swarsystems.com