You know I’m always looking for the best tools, that get out of the way and let you work.

One of my gripes with the current choice of drum sampling software is their inability to understand how simply we want to layer sounds.

Many folks just want to drag a sound to a pad, then another, and another, and have instant access to each layer to tweak and create new composite sounds.

Unfortunately, many of the products out just don’t get that. Most make you go deep into the keymapping setup to layer sounds on the keys, or they don’t allow layering at all, or it’s so complicated you just say forget it and just play each sound on it’s own, layering “in sequence”!

Enter Poise…from an independent developer one small clue…someone who, like me, must have been fed up with the current crop, bloat, and “just don’t get it” operation of the majority of software drum samplers out now.

What we need is something  that’s simple, cost effective, lean, clean…and to the point.

So what is Poise?

In my mind, poise is the drum sampler we’ve all been looking for.

Poise is what I would make if I could write software….

Poise is a simple, 16 pad drum sampler that lets you quickly add layers, manipulate the layers, and come up with new sounds.

Poise is NOT a sequencer.  You can NOT sample into it.

from the site:

Direct, straightforward, no frills and no bloat! Poise aims to make working with drum samples quick and painless, allowing you to focus on making music.

sounds good to me, so good I had to keep it under wraps until I could actually SHOW you what it did.  It’s not new, it’s been around, but I just found out about it and I know many of you will love it, because I get the same questions from folks looking for an easy drum sampler that let’s you layer your drums quickly and tweak each layer.

Why I think Poise “gets it”

Why do I think it’s the best? Let me list the reasons.

• It’s easy to layer sounds, just drag them onto the pad, and a layer number will appear in the window
• layers can be played in round robin, layered, or velocity switching mode
• You can have up to 16 outpus, enough to send each pad to it’s own track in your daw if you want
• It’s easy to setup to work with your midi controller
• You can have note on or oneshot mode for your samples
• It has mono mode, so you can get down like on your hardware, making pads cut each other
• You also have “cut groups” so you can set pads to cut each other off
• You can link pads… so you can quickly layer multiple sounds just by linking the pads together
• You can save your own kits quickly
• You can tweak aeach layer on a pad separately or together
• you can use wav, aiff, or mpc snd format sounds
• It’s lean and cpu efficient
• It’s 49 bucks

What about the interface, is it easy to use?

Very easy, very clean, very straight forward, and very intuitive.

It has everything you need to layer and play with your samples, and nothing you don’t.

No sequencer screen that you won’t use getting in the way.

No complex menus of keygroups and mapping to mess with.

16 pads, each with 8 layers, knobs to tweak each layer/sound…and not much else.

right-clicking on a pad let’s you access things like note on/oneshot mode, or mono mode, pad linking, etc.

It’s really simple, and everything you would try to do naturally, it just does it…this is the way a simple drum sampler should be…not a bunch of bells, whistles, and balloons.

So you really like it huh?

Uhhh….yeah.

This plugin is 5 subs all the way around in my honest opinion…I could hardly contain myself when I found out about it.

Try it and tell me it’s not what you’ve been looking for. You can layer, edit start and end points of samples, send each pad to it’s own output in your daw for simple tracking….tweak each layer, save your kits….really what else do you need in a drum sampler?

I honestly, so far, can’t think of anything I would change about it. It does what it needs to do…allow quick playing and manipulation of samples.

check it out at One Small Clue, download the demo, and see for yourself.

let me know what you think of course, leave a comment below.

Enter the drum GURU…

Over the years, software has constantly improved and offered the same and even better functionality to the hardware we are
used to using.

We’ve had drum machines, sequencers, drum samplers, slicers, dicers and food processors…okay, maybe not the last one.

But, many people, especially in the urban electronic genres like hip hop, techno, dnb, electronica, house, breakbeat, downtempo..well
you get the idea…we’ve been looking for something to give us the straight forward work flow we are used to from our legendary
akai mpc sampling drum sequencers.

Many have tried, few have succeeded.

Over the past few months we have seen many MPC-alike software rise up. MOTU bpm, and Native Instruments Maschine are the newest contenders, but one that many seem to forget about is the one that started the whole software mpc style program craze.

FXpansion GURU is the originator in MPC style software programs.

But the real question is, what has kept it relevant for so long, and does it really give the hardware style experience.

My MPC may get a little jealous

I’ve been able to spend some quality time with GURU since fxpansion sent it over for review, and I will say that I really like the work flow.

First off, it’s easy to get in and get a drum-loop going, I mean very easy.

You can use some of the included drum grooves, or load up the pads with your own loops and phrases.

The anatomy of a drum GURU..

GURU will take some getting used to, yet it’s familiar for many hardware users at the same time.

It has a 16 pad layout, and is broken up into 8 “engines” each engine can have it’s own set of 24 patters, 16 pads, effects, quantize, and everything.  Each pad has it’s own “lane” in the step sequencer window, so effectively this is like 16 tracks in each engine.

Slice in dice is easy as loading a loop

for those of you that like to mangle up drum loops and other phrases via slicing you’ll love GURU’s smart-slicing abilities.  Anything you browse to under the “loop” tab will be automatically sliced either by 16th or by transients, GURU will even  analyze the frequency and place the proper slices from a drum loop in the kick, snare, hi hat, and perc locations on the pads.  sweetness!

It’s also very easy to edit the slices it auto-generates for you, and messing with the sensitivity and accuracy also yields you more control over the slices you get.

But for me, I found an easy way to make my own slices without using the auto features. I like to load a phrase on one pad, set the start/end point, then copy to the next pad and pick my next slice. Old school asr-10 style baby!

I’d really like a way to just load in a wav sample and pick my slices then drag or assign them to pads, maybe in the next version, but this way works fine and is very quick for those of us that like to pick our own chops.

Layers like an onion.

One of the most useful features of the MPC series is being able to layer your sounds on one pad GURU does this with ease, all you do is go into the pad edit mode, and click layer, then pick any of the layers you want to add your sound to.   You can also set the layers to play all at once, by velocity, in round-robin mode, or random

FX for days…

Sometimes, especially on certain MPC models, you run out of fx or it’s not as flexible as you’d like, with GURU that’s fixed.

You can add effects anywhere you wish, to the entire group or “engine” as GURU calls it, to the pad, or to the overall output. You can also use some flexible routing if you want to send your pads/phrases to different locations inside your daw for more flexibility.

Feel the groove baby.

GURU can apply many of the built in grooves, or it can extract the groove from your loaded drum phrases and riffs so you can later apply it to your other sequences.

Like the groove of the drum-loop you just put together? Cool, now save it and you’ll have it ready to use in your groove library.

Many people love this feature, and you can adjust the amount of groove you want to be applied, of course it’s all non destructive so you can change it at any time.

It’s the little things that count

A lot of little things that make hardware fun to work with are available in GURU.  Things like note repeat, pad chromatic, velocity spreading, note erase, and undo are just a few.  You can also use the audio export features to export your pad (great for creating custom drum kits to use in other programs)

your track, the current engine, or everything inside guru.

The final verdict

With all the software competing for the spot of your go-to grove machine, GURU remains a top contender for it’s easy of use and flexibility.

There are some things I would like to see, like I said, the ability to drag a wave file in, apply slices, adjust the slices to my liking, THEN export the slices to the pads.  I’d like to see tap tempo functionality, I can’t believe this is missing.

I’d also like a count in feature when doing real-time recording, most all hardware and software sequencers have this feature…it should at least be an option.  I look forward to the next version or whatever the successor of GURU will be.

Will we get more engines? More fx? More slicing options? Integrated audio sampling?  More sample file import features like akai , battery, and all mpc formats? That would make the migration easier for us hardware heads.

What about some of their sexy synth technology under the hood? Like a software mpc 5000 with better implementation!

I could go on for days on my greedy wishlist, but the fact remains the product is a great one as is.

Whatever the future brings will be welcome, but let’s not overlook what we already have.

GURU is a very powerful machine, I’m just getting familiar so their is no doubt things I haven’t learned yet.  I will continue to play with it, and continue to share what I find.

GURU is definitely a software any drum machine/groove lover should have in their toolkit.

Go check it out on their website. FXpansion GURU

It’s a fun litt program that I really enjoy using.

Let me know what you think about it, please leave your comments below!