Detail of GURUs user interface.
Have you ever dreamed of the perfect one-in-all solution tool, that is compact, versatile and every knob and key just at the right place? Welcome to GURU, the sound-sequencer I really have waited for a long time now.
The basic interaction concept is similar to Fruity Loops. When you liked Fruity’s usability concept, than you will be in love with GURU, because they took the interaction concept much further and tightened it up to fit to drum-based sequences and loops. The sound engine is cool and professional, while the performance of the application is CPU optimized like it should be. Best: there are no useless features. Every feature got its own place, is working tight with versatile features showing up just in the right places.
GURU is basically a drum pattern editor made by the company fxpansion that focuses on drum software only. A very sympathic approach and this difference you can experience. You can’t design such a tool without love and devotion to your product. If there is a perfect drum sequencer, than it’s GURU.
This here is the most spontaneous and upfront music sequencer I’ve ever had my hands on. You can do stuff in seconds, for what you would take in other applications minutes or even longer. For example: You dynamically load a loop into the application. GURU slices it into single beats in seconds and the sliced beats are put into pattern of the actual pattern memory. While the music keeps playing all the time! The sliced loop will instantly play. From there you can directly start to play around with the loop and re-arrange the beat. Once you got a nice pattern, you can clone the beat by dragging and dropping to another pattern memory slot. Here you can make some modifications and than switch on the fly forth and back between your new version and the previous one – all saved in the pattern memory. There are 24 pattern memory slots on each channel. There are 8 channels in total – and every channel can be customized by own sounds, samples and effect settings. At that high level is the whole interaction concept. On each channel you can add effects on single samples or the whole channel, layer samples, micro-manipulate the steps in the pattern sequencer or add grooves and swing. You can also derive custom made grooves from sequences you made and instantly apply them on other loops or sequences. Really, you can get from breakbeats into techno forth and back within seconds. Next up will be obtaining musical ideas.
The only downside I found: the soundengine has a very perfect, rounded and glassy sound. For my taste the sound could be much warmer and a little blurred out the borders, but I bet you can burst this in by using right sounds and plug-in effects or equalizer setting to add some harshness or warmth. Future updates could include work on this to make GURU a glowing, warm and spiritual machine when playing live, with that extra quench of analogue goodness.
Weblinks and Hands on
GURU Page
FXpansion Website
On the site are also overviews and beat making tutorial videos available. Unfortunately the tutorials are a little bit to slow and do not show the fast playful and upfront vibe. We like instant techno in two minutes!
