Very similar in many ways to 'Algonauts' 'Atlas' with your one shot samples being mapped out (albeit much smaller here). But things go way way deeper with XO including a plethora of editing features which takes ones beat making to an entirely different level. Great fun to be had here for sure!
XO identifies and collects one-shot samples stored anywhere on your computer or hard drives and sorts them by similarity. It brings your samples of choice into a new creative context that facilitates experimentation.
You can use XO as stand-alone or with your favorite DAW along with other plugins. You load XO as an instrument into your DAW. XO is used preferably but not exclusively for beat making and rhythm production using, what you consider to be drum sounds.
Browsing and editing sound become a part of your creative processes instead of disrupting your workflow.
Features
- Load your own samples: Duplicates. Vague file names. Folders in different locations or on external drives. XO sorts them all – regardless of where and how they are stored.
Find your sound faster: Narrow the scope with XO’s powerful filters and search functionalities to find what you’re looking for even faster.
- Ready for action: Factory Samples & Presets – Get a flying start to your beatmaking with XO’s inspiring presets and 8000+ hand-picked factory samples. No matter the music style or amount of sounds in your current sample collection, XO has you covered.
- Perfect your groove: Sculpt the perfect groove with the curated Groove Templates, Nudge your patterns to boost raw urgency or funky sluggishness, and add life and dynamics to your beat with the powerful Accentuator.
- Drag & drop: Drag and drop with ease into your own workflow. Tweaked or raw. Individual samples or the whole beat. Audio or MIDI.
Great little drum machine from 'Air' which is easy to get to grips with and sounds great. Many drum machines out there but this one is very highly recommended for it's simplicity and ease of use. Using MIDI notes to trigger the 16 step patterns is fab!!!
Air Music Technology originally created Boom as part of the Creative Collection of instrument plug-ins included as part of Avid™ Pro Tools™. As the popularity of Pro Tools grew, more and more musicians and producers relied on the incredible sonic firepower of this amazing Drum Machine. Boom continued to evolve, and demand grew. Boom is now available on its own by popular demand, available to anyone who demands instant creativity in AU/VST formats.
Boom features a slick modern interface that pays homage to the most popular vintage drum machines of the past. Boom has been used on many famous projects since its launch, ranging from hit albums, feature films and radio projects. It’s one of the most loved Pro Tools Plugins.
Boom includes a diverse collection of 10 different classic electronic drum kits, offering variations on the classic 808 and 909 kits, more aggressive Dance and Urban-style kits and a powerful retro style kit modelled on the concept of a 'CR78 merged with a 606'. Each one has been created with great attention to detail and provides serious sonic impact.
Each kit contains 10 different drums, and you can adjust the panning, volume, tuning and decay of each drum within a kit. Each drum channel also contains a special tuning screw that can be turned to make a sonic adjustment, specific to a particular drum. This tweaking ability provides for nearly limitless possibilities with a user-friendly interface.
You can mix and match drums from different kits to make your own custom kit, and the drum sounds can be triggered individually via standard MIDI pitch mappings.
For instant inspiration, over 50 presets are included cover contemporary, classic electronic/urban musical genres. Boom also has an on-board sequencer that enables you to create and trigger your own patterns, which can be saved and recalled as presets.
You can select different patterns using the keys along the bottom of the interface, when you're in Pattern Select mode, and these are conveniently color‑coded to show you how they map to a MIDI keyboard from middle 'C' upwards for remote selection.
The Matrix display in the top left enables you to program a pattern, but if you prefer you can also use the keys along the bottom, this time with Pattern Edit mode selected. You'll find some nice touches, such as the ability to copy one pattern to another, and some simple controls for adjusting the way in which the pattern plays back within your host: normal, double, half or triplet time, and there's even a swing control mirroring classic MPC’s and other vintage drum machines/samplers.
Wonderful drum synth with lots of modern up to date drum sounds. Quite different to others in that you can customize the 8 drum sequences to the keys on your keyboard and then add other sounds. An incredible amount of options here from fine tuning your drum sounds to adding FX. A definite go to drum machine!! I particularly like the 'Ian Boddy' presets which goes to show how more cinematic oriented this plug in is!
Based around the BD module of the multi award winning Punch virtual drum
synth, Rob Papen delivers a creative module to help you to produce the
fattest sounding bass drums for your music.
Stacking bass drums
is a popular technique used by today's music producers and Punch-BD
gives you the ability to stack up to 6 in total. Divide the 6 BD pads
over the keyboard or use them 'stacked' in tuned mode to produce
creative new BD sounds for all styles of contemporary music.
Punch-BD
delivers synthesized drums in the finest audio quality or you can
choose to load in your own samples for complete flexibility. Each pad
has its own distortion module with several distortion types as well as
its own 3 band graphic EQ. What's more, each individual pad also has its
own preset section next to the overall 'BD kit'.
Like its big
brother, Punch-BD features four FX units each with many 31 types of top
quality FX plus further filters, envelopes, modulation routings and more
for crafting your own unique sound.
From Electronic Dance and Hip Hop to Soundtrack projects, Punch-BD provides a solid speaker-busting sound for your productions.
Wonderful beat making machine with an intuitive interface and limitless possibilities. I love the fact that one can totally randomize everything and vary the levels to what you like . Great FX and modulation features too. One of the best for beats.
Polyplex by Native Instruments has been designed in collaboration with Twisted Tools and is an eight-part drum sampler with an emphasis on randomizing all kinds of elements to create new, interesting and unique kits. It’s probably aimed most directly at producers making electronic music though these days that means casting a net much wider than EDM and can encompass soundtracks, TV music and other genres. It runs in the free Reaktor 5 Player or in the full version of Reaktor 5 and thus can run either as a standalone app on your Mac or PC or as a plug-in inside your DAW in all of the major plug-in formats. At just £59 / $69 it’s remarkably good value too as you may agree after having read about its capabilities.
Color-codedPolyplex has eight slots and each one of these can hold up to four samples which make up the different layers of that specific drum sound. Layering sounds together to build beefier sounding kits isn’t new but the way the instrument works with them is much more ambitious than you might expect. Each layer can have a type and a subtype selected such as Kick > Analog or Snare > Acoustic for example. Polyplex comes with around 200 MB of samples which isn’t a lot but once you see how flexibly it lets you work with them, will almost certainly seem like enough. There is a “User” option in each layer which allows you to use your own samples as layers, though this does mean delving into Reaktor’s Sample Map Editor which might mean spending some time teaching yourself how that works if you don’t already know. In truth although it’s nice to have the option (albeit a slightly fiddly one) of using your own samples you may well be happy with the bundled content.
Next to this section are various sound control sliders. Samples lets you
specify which sample to use and is set as a MIDI value between 0 and
127. Pitch and Pan do what you probably guessed they do and Start sets
the starting position of each layer in time. Finally there’s a volume
section to mix the layers against each other. If you click through to
the other control sections you will find similar sliders for Envelope
parameters and also for EQ and all these controls have configurable
minimum and maximum values so you’re not always varying between 0 and
100% of any given control.
Totally at random
Here’s where stuff starts to get
interesting: you can randomize almost anything in Polyplex. Starting
with the master control panel at the top, you’ll find a Master
Randomization button. If you press this, Polyplex will alter each slot
and each layer within each slot plus the controls of any layer that has
randomization enabled. You can actually switch randomization on or off
for any slot and also for any parameter where the small dot button
appears. So you can either randomize a whole kit, or if you’re mostly
happy with it, just randomize one drum sound to alter it. Or, just
randomize the start position of one layer and nothing else, or any
combination of the above!
There are seven Kit Variation slots
available per instance for copying and pasting setups and creating
modifications as well as the ability to map MIDI keys or notes to
individual slots using MIDI learn. For any sound slot, there’s also a
quick controls bar where you can control volume, balance, tuning and
decay with the mouse for quick sound alteration. You might notice the
sound slots are color-coded, and these sync up with the colored keys
(Light Guide) on NI’s new Komplete Kontrol range of hardware MIDI
control keyboards.
Sounding great
This all works brilliantly and it’s a breeze
to create whole new kits or make cool sounding changes to existing ones
using these randomize controls. There are also some great onboard
effects to liven things up: 18 to choose from including dynamics, reverb
and glitch and you can use up to four at once, two inserts and two
sends. These are very cutting edge, modern-sounding effects and
encompass stuff like stutter, grain delay, frequency and pitch shifting,
and they sound awesome!
These are very cutting edge,
modern-sounding effects and encompass stuff like stutter, grain delay,
frequency and pitch shifting, and they sound awesome!
Better
still, you can add movement and life to the effects by assigning the
envelope follower section to effect parameters for rhythmic modulation.
Also assign the LFO, envelope or velocity sections to modulate many
different parameters, such as the attack envelope or sound pan with
variable amounts and you can quickly create a fluid, dynamic, shifting
effect. And remember that all this stuff can be set up for each
individual layer of each of the eight slots. You can see how much
control you can have over the drum sounds.
Poly is a cracker
All of this would be a bit dry were it not
for the fact that Polyplex sounds excellent. Check out the audio demos
on NI’s website and you will surely be blown away by just how usable
these sounds are. They beg you to build epic tracks around them, with
their huge kicks, crisp, animated snares and cymbals and a weird and
wonderful assortment of bleeps, sweeps and futuristic sound effects.
This is a very different instrument to something like Battery that comes
with a stack of content and focuses on waveform manipulation. Here, you
are presented with a rather different set of controls but ones which
are even more useful for the majority of electronic producers. The 142
presets are mostly great too.
Final Thoughts
Let’s be honest, building drum kits can be
pretty dull, cycling through hundreds of vaguely similar sounding
samples until you start to go nuts. Polyplex does away with a lot of
that tedium. Sure, you can go into great detail with tweaking the sound
if you like, and sometimes you might. Maybe you’re obsessive about this
stuff, and that’s cool. If on the other hand you want to keep hitting a
button until the snare sounds like you want, you can do that too. Or hit
the Master Randomize button to just fire all-new settings across the
instrument. Dial in some cool sounding effects, tweak them and use MIDI
to modulate them too for an even more interesting and dynamic sound, and
you’ll wonder why you ever spent hours looking for drum hits that
worked well together. With the really quite affordable Polyplex, it’s a
snap to build massive, cutting edge kits and tailor them to your needs
quickly and easily.Review from ASKaudio
