It's here!
One word? "POWER!!!!!!!!!"
Check out this streaming tune made with Dance eJay 2: DEEP

I remember the first time I ever encountered the word "eJay".

Previous to that day, I had formed a vague distant vision of myself in the future, on a stage surrounded by mountains of wires, boxes, beats, fans and £££.
Just me. On my own. Yeah, yeah, no chance. Heard it.
But I wasn't to give up - oh no, not yet. It's surely worth a try, at least once. I went down to my local software dealer, and asked what the best music making software was, and could I have it please?
The ignorant pile of scrotal discharge handed naïve little me a brand spanking new copy of: DA DA DA: Techno Maker -{spit}-
Okay, four hours of that s**t and I'm like: "F**K THAT!!!!"

Two months pass, me having given music the old heave ho thanx to the lovely Techno Maker -{spit}-

PC Pro pops through the letter box, and I go for a rummage around the coverdisk. Located within the usual same old same old, is a nice little red icon with a microphone. This I will regard as a turning point in my life until the day I die. One swift double click plunged me headlong into the world of Dance eJay (a world which Techno Maker -{spit}- had convinced me did not exist on our plane). Ten minutes later, I had my PC speakers hanging out of my window over the street, shouting to anyone in earshot: "I made this!!!".

I had the full program of Dance eJay the next day, it became an extension to my soul, and the rest - as they say - is history.

AND NOW THE FUTURE

And now Dance eJay 2 . I feel humbled. Let's have a moment silence please.

EVOLUTION

Okay, y'know that car ad: "It's Evolved"? That slogan seems more appropriate for Dance eJay 2, and if you read on you'll see why I say this.

Maybe you want to read the Dance eJay 2 review straight away, so the eJay Evoluton is on a seperate page; but be warned: A lot of statements and comparisons in this review are dependant on you having read the Evolution page.

The eJay Evolution - The history of the eJay interface

Current Phase:

POWER!!!!!! CONTROL!!!!!

Where do I start?

Of course, I start HERE 16 TRACKS SIXTEEN TRACKS 16 16 16 6TEEN Just rolls off the tongue pleasurably…..

16 TRACKS!

I feel tiny looking at my screen. 16 TRACKS! No more frantically swapping samples around to make room for just one more clap or hihat. No more saving the mix in the middle of a heavy tune mixing session just to export two samples together to save space. Oh no.
This is 1999 for god sake. We have the luxury of Dance eJay 2, 16 TRACKS! I don't need to dwell on it any more. You know what that means: You'll never run out of space again!

Reality Bites
Finally, an eJay program you can update in realtime. Now, if you're listening to a 7 minute tune from the beginning and you see a sample coming up that you forgot to remove, you can delete it (if you're fast enough) without having to stop the tune!

Help!
	Just in case you're new to the scene, there's a nice friendly chap hidden inside Dance eJay 2 willing to show you everything you need to know in the form of a brand new tutorial feature. You can call him up any time you want. The program also features tooltips, and a comprehensive help file.


Love Handles
	In the previous eJay programs, you could only select samples by dragging a box over them. This was a pain for selecting individual samples. Now you can select individual samples simply by clicking on them. But the fun doesn't stop there. When you select one sample, a horizontal handle appears across the middle. You can drag this up and down the sample to edit the volume. Better still, there are two more vertical handles on the left and right sides, and these are used to cut the beginning or end off the sample. It has never before been possible to cut the beginning of a sample, and the only way to cut the end was to place another sample on top. My one criticism of this feature is that the display used when fine-tuning sample positioning (showing the position to the 16^th of a bar) should also have been applied here.


Recording Studio
	The recording feature is now fully integrated into the track editing window. You can select any of the individual tracks (by clicking the microphone) to record your raps or whatever directly into the mix.


Groovy!

EVOLUTION! Remember the stumps evolved by the Hypergenerator? They've turned into legs, and since evolved into wings. I am of course, referring to Dance eJay's hot Groove Generator! I would buy this on it's own, but it comes as standard with every copy of Dance eJay 2! There are ten pads, each of which you can assign one of 500 kick, snare, hihat, cymbal, perc or drumFX samples, alter the pitch or even reverse the sample if you want!! Once they're assigned, you can either play live along to your track using keys 1 - 0 on your keyboard just like a real drum machine, or program the beat into the Groove Generator Matrix (the wings version of the Hypergenerator), to be saved and added into the mix. You can then add filter, echo or distortion to the loop. And there's more! You would think that this newly created drum sample would take up one of your 16 tracks (not that you'd miss one track with 16 to choose from), but no! the Groove Generator has it's own special track (giving you a total of 17). And don't worry about the stereo orientation with just one track either, because you can assign stereo values to each individual drum pad! Phew! This is perhaps my favourite part: You don't need to calculate the positions of the beats in the Groove Generator Matrix; you can select the drum track for recording just like any of the 16 regular tracks, press record and then use the number keys to record your drums live! Unlike the Hypergenerator of old, these drumloops are recorded as a form of midi data (rather than audio). This means that after you've recorded live, you can fine-tune the beats in the Matrix!

FX off!
Fasttrak have really mastered this effects malarkey. The Effect Studio is the place to take your samples for aural surgery. In addition to the effects available for drum loops, the Effect Studio features a "robotize" effect. This feature is ideal for de-cheesifying those vocal samples, and turning them into something you can use without being hung.

Slower… no, faster!!

There are now two ways to change tempos in Dance eJay 2. The first is derived from Hip-Hop eJay in the form of the speed/pitch slider next to the volume. You can speed up or slow down your entire mix from here, diversifying the range of music styles available.

An entirely new feature for eJay, is the tempo adjust for a single sample. Very useful.

In addition to these features, Dance eJay 2 has a "beat detection" system for imported samples: It determines the bpm of the sample and if it's not 140bpm, it offers to change it. However, I think that this is based on the length of the sample rather that calculations of beats contained within the sample. So unless you know for a fact that your sample is perfectly looped with the wrong tempo (Rave eJay loops for example) I wouldn't recommend using it.

In The Mix
Also included is the Mixing Desk for total control of individual track volumes. It's about time eJay programs featured this item.

Pretty Things
The interface is a bit quieter colourwise. Well, they don't need to shout anymore do they? But there are a lot of nice touches. For example, the stereo buttons fade away when you turn them off and the samples have got a nice marble finish.

A Taste of Paradise
There are still the same loop/sample groups as before (Loop, Drum, Bass, Seq, Layer, Rap, Voice, Effect and Imported Samples). Now you can select from the new Guitar sample group and the GrooveG group where your custom drum loops are kept. These 1000 or so new samples have been professionally produced, like before, but now you can tell they have been made on better equipment for a more professional sound.

So there's the whole deal in black and orange. Can you feel The Power yet? Fasttrak have thought of EVERYTHING!

I must get this message across: as far as I am concerned, Dance eJay 2 is not a sequel to Dance eJay, it's an unbelievably evolved update. When you install Dance eJay 2, it automatically loads all the samples installed for Dance eJay (inc. Samplekits). It can play mix files made with Dance eJay, so you can give all your old tunes the magic touch, that is, if you can stop making brand spanking new ones. All the samples correspond to the same star formations, so all Dance eJay loops from wherever in time still go well together. You really don't need Dance eJay anymore. Just as the Dance Samplekits (I have got them now!) were a more up to date sound than Dance eJay's original samples, Dance eJay 2's are better still and with more samplekits to come!

I see it like this: 500 samples to a samplekit for about £15, and 1000 samples with Dance eJay 2 for about £30 (I think). Basically, I see this as 2 new samplekits for Dance eJay, but with an unbelievably amazing free interface update packed with new features and better than we could ever have imagined.

POWER RATING: The Big Bang

Dance eJay was an extension of the soul.

Dance eJay 2 is a greatly extended extension of the soul.

And if all that wasn't enough for you, Judgement Day is coming. When it arrives, I will personally hunt down everyone who doesn't own Dance eJay 2 with a shotgun and a mobile torture chamber.

Click here to download a German demo for Dance eJay 2.

NEW- Sample Kits Reviewed

Stuff I Should have Mentioned - DE2 Day - 30-04-99

Dance eJay 2 also contains a feature which allows you to save any imported files used inside the mix file. This means you no longer need to locate samples for a messy zip file.

Fasttrak are releasing 3 new Dance Sample Kits on the same day as Dance eJay 2 (April 30th). They are:

Volume 4 - House
Volume 5 - Trance
Volume 6 - Latin Dance

Both Dance eJay 2 and the Sample Kits can be bought at any good software stockists. Alternatively, you can buy from Fasttrak over the phone (0800 056 1799), or from their website http://www.fasttrak.co.uk/music/order.html

I'll give you more information on these products as I get it.