The friendly ghostĪ lot of musicians are going to fall madly in love with Geist, especially those producing dance, hip-hop, R&B or pretty much anything that requires a tight creative flow and a killer groove. This is another area in which the new Retro Record feature comes in handy - it means you can freely experiment until you have something you like and then use that pattern, even if you're not sure exactly how you did it - taking away the stress of having to perform on demand. In song mode, you draw in the patterns you want to trigger and jam over the top. The GUI is based on the classic sequencer view, so on the left-hand side are the eight engine tracks, while along the top you'll find all of the song position/bar numbers. It makes Geist feel like a real instrument, because the entire process, from sampling to sequencing, can be done in a hands-on, real-time way.įXpansion have expanded this scenes concept further with the new song page, where you can arrange your entire drum track within Geist's deceptively modest interface. These scenes are an ingenious, powerful way of accessing everything at once in a live situation. A far more convenient way of doing this, though, is to use 'scenes', whereby you define sets of patterns to trigger from a single MIDI note (a bit like triggering scenes in Ableton Live's Session view). To trigger patterns across several engines simultaneously, you can send MIDI notes on multiple channels. You add The Spitter wherever in your project you'd like to sample from, then select it as an input in Geist. Its interface is minimal, but that's perfect for what it does. You can route audio from elsewhere within your DAW to Geist's sampler via an additional included plug-in named The Spitter. It's difficult to make it sound bad, even at extreme values or when applied to problematic sounds like kick drums. It uses an algorithm called Dirac3, and it definitely has its own sound - it's far from grainy and is actually very smooth. This is all made even more fun by the new timestretching tool that's built into every pad layer. We tested this while working on an electro house track and were able to rapidly churn out endless variations on drum fills and glitch-type edits. It can record audio live from an external source and even resample - thus you can use Geist to build a beat, resample it, slice it back into individual hits, remix it with the pattern editor and take full advantage of yet another stage of automation and effects. How does this work? Well, Geist is essentially recording in the background at all times, so you can capitalise on those spontaneous ideas that pop out while you're just messing around.Īlso new is the Sampler page, which is designed to be used on the fly. Recording in Geist is great fun and made easier by the new Retro Record functionality, which enables you to rescue rhythms you were jamming out even before you hit record. Recording patterns via a MIDI controller (or even the mouse) gives a real 'hands-on' feel and, just like Guru, Geist does a great job of capturing the subtle nuances of your groove unlike Guru, it has up to 1024 steps per pattern. It means that you're unlikely to ever run out of pads or patterns, and makes more sense than having an enormous, unmanageable interface that you have to wrestle with to access its power. Think of it as eight instances of Geist, but all accessible from one interface and triggerable as the same MIDI device. Number crunchingĢ4 patterns and a full set of 16 pads constitute an 'engine', of which there are eight. It sounds surprisingly convincing, especially on the compressors. Overloud's Breverb algorithms have been licensed for reverb modules, while FXpansion's DCAM circuit-modelling technology has been used on some of the saturation, compression and filter modules. The internal effects sound as good - if not better - as those bundled with most DAWs, and there's no shortage of them either, with 30 to choose from. Quality mixing tools are provided at pretty much every conceivable point in the signal chain, enabling you to polish your drum mix to a fine sheen.
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