The Nature Funky Beats Matt Wax

Getting Your Hands on The Nature Funky Beats Matt Wax

I've been running these loops through my sessions for about three years now. They're not magic, but they fill a gap that most sample packs ignore. The kit leans into broken-funk territory — drum breaks that sound like they were pulled from a dusty vinyl chop session, layered with guitar stabs and basslines that sit slightly behind the beat. You can grab them directly from the Matt Wax Bandcamp page, which also hosts the individual stems if you want to dig into the raw material. Most people just stream the previews though, so I'll explain what actually happens when you put these into a DAW before you hit buy. The core of this pack is built around swing and tape warble. Every loop has a deliberate tempo drift baked in, which means it won't quantize cleanly if you try to lock it to a rigid grid. I learned that the hard way. I once tried to force a 128bpm Matt Wax break onto a straight click track and the result sounded like the loop was fighting itself. The fix was simple: disable the tempo map entirely and let the loop run free, then overdub my own drums on top using a loose MPC-style timing offset instead of trying to snap everything to sixteen-step quantization. The loops range roughly from 85 to 108 BPM. The ones around 92 to 96 BPM tend to work best for hip-hop adjacent production. Anything faster starts to feel rushed when you're adding layers on top because the existing arrangement leaves very little headroom in the midrange. That's not a flaw in the pack, it's just how the original source material was structured.

What people don't usually mention is the low-end philosophy here. These kicks and bass tones are deliberately sub-heavy but mid-scooped. If your mix bus already has a solid bass guitar or synth bass competing in the 100 to 200Hz range, you'll get mud fast. I typically sidechain the Matt Wax loops against my primary bass at about 3dB of gain reduction with a medium attack. That's enough to carve space without making the loop sound thin or artificial. A high-pass filter at 35Hz on the loop itself also helps clean up any unnecessary rumble that sneaks in during transitions. The individual stem files are useful but they require some attention. The hi-hat layer on most tracks has a significant tape hiss and the snare layer often shares a room mic bleed with the percussion overheads. If you're processing each stem independently, you'll notice phase issues between the close mics and the room tracks, especially on the snare. The workaround is to flip the polarity on one of the layered snare tracks and sweep a narrow EQ boost between 2kHz and 4kHz while listening for the point where the transients snap tightest. That phase alignment step usually adds maybe five minutes per track, but it makes the difference between a muddy drum mix and something that cuts through properly. One thing worth noting is the tempo inconsistency across different loops in the same folder. Two loops might both be labeled around 94 BPM but actually sit anywhere from 92.5 to 95.3 BPM when you stretch them to match a project grid. This is normal for vintage-sourced material and it's not something you need to "fix" by warping. Trying to time-stretch every loop to match your project tempo exactly will degrade the transient response and make the tape warble sound digital. Instead, adjust your project tempo to match the loop you're building from, or let the loop play at its natural speed and record or sequence around it.

I've also found that these loops respond well to saturation but they don't handle heavy distortion well. Running them through a tube emulator or a tape saturation plugin like the kind modeled after the Fairchild or the Studer A800 adds thickness without destroying the transient detail. Pushing them through guitar amp simulators or bit-crushers mostly just muddies the midrange and makes the loop sound generic. The original texture is already dense enough that additional harmonic saturation beyond about 15 percent is usually unnecessary. For live performance or improvisation workflows, I route the Matt Wax loops through a Ableton Simpler or the sampler in Reason, then manually trigger the hits with a MIDI controller. This lets me chop the loop into individual segments and rearrange them in real time. It's slower than just dropping the full loop in and arranging around it, but it gives you a lot more control over the energy flow, especially during longer sets where the same loop playing straight through gets predictable within four bars. The main limitation with this pack is that it's not designed for modern pop or EDM production. The arrangements are loose, the drum patterns don't follow standard four-on-the-floor structures, and the melodic content leans heavily on minor-key guitar and Rhodes vibes. If you need bright supersaws, risers, or big build-ups, you'll need to supplement these loops with your own sound design. They work best as a foundation layer rather than the sole melodic or harmonic source in a track.

There's also a subtle noise floor to every loop, even in the stems. Some producers find that unacceptable for clean mixes, but it's a feature of the source material and it's consistent enough that it doesn't clash with other analog-modeled elements. If your project already contains heavily processed or sterile digital elements, the noise floor might become more audible in those sections, so it's worth blending the Matt Wax loops in gradually rather than laying them down at full volume from the start.