Insta buy
Everything by Bram Bos is an insta buy for me. This groovebox is nothing short of instant inspiration. Love the generative dials for creating riffs. Sounds great. It’s been on most of my tracks for the past six months, even if just to add some “icing on the cake”. Would love to see more groove boxes with Bram’s innovative take.
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Compatibilité
Cette application est t’elle compatible avec FL Studio. J’espère sinon est t’il prévu une mise à jour.
Awesome
Once I piped these channels out to Transit things really came alive. Love it
Love it
Absolutely love this groove box. Instant inspiration from fresh FM sound generators, with intuitively easy to reharmonize patterns. So cool.
One ask would be to move the sends and fx to the bottom panel to give it more of a mixer feel and to have everything on screen at the same time.
One ask would be to move the sends and fx to the bottom panel to give it more of a mixer feel and to have everything on screen at the same time.
Would be 5 stars if only there wasn’t some missing functionality that leaves me frustrated…
First of all this app sounds pretty great. I especially love the kicks and the drums in general, and also the bass synth Trouble. These alone are like having a pocket version of the Behringer ‘Acid Yellow’ synths, such as the TD-3 and the RD-6. The nice tight drums combined with that squelching frog style acid bass (which sounds even better when compressed and sidechained with the built in compressor) probably sounds better than anything made with stock analog synth equivalents. I especially love the rumble kick options, which are great for making techno style kick / bass drums, and I also love the hats which sound killer when compressed and ducked to the kick. The other synths are fairly good too, but I much prefer the Trouble / acid bass synth personally, but there are a couple of different options, if only a few, although some synths do allow for some different sounds to be switched with a button.
Now for the criticism that knocked a star off. The score was tough because on one hand I love this and it sounds great, but on the other there’s a lot missing that I feel will lead to the stagnation of this app in future. Like the generative options are cool and I get that the goal is to get you up and running with a track as quickly as possible, but what’s missing is the features or functionality for AFTER that process. The random generator is essentially just one knob that you pull up to throw something random in the mix. That’s cool and all but what are supposed to do after that? Or if you like something but want to edit it or expand it manually? Well as far as I can tell, you can’t really do that. There’s a cut feature and another knob which can partially wrangle the random notes, but no way to manually move the notes in a musical or sequencer based way as expected with other tools. This feels like such a shame because if I could do that, then I would be thinking this was one of the coolest apps that I’ve bought recently, but it can’t do I’m left frustrated with nowhere to go pretty quickly.
There’s little in the way of preset control either, and for example you can’t load a cool drum preset while loading a separate bass preset, it’s just one saved file for everything that only saves 5 max states within that you can’t edit, or even name, or tweak instruments separately, or in any way that I actually want or need to. It’s hard to describe but it’s not unlike using analog gear, with no preset function, so you can’t really easily change or save or revisit things well.
I do appreciate that you can send midi to this separately, and I use it with AUM with apps like LK Midi and Drambo to send notes to the different channels which the synths are listening on, but you can’t use any of the random generative features at the same time, and I am left wanting more functionality from within the app itself, or more buttons than are actually available. A synth sequencer for example would be great, and there’s one for drums but nothing else which leaves a hole for me, and I feel like I can start something interesting and with great sounding instruments, only to then eventually run into a wall with nowhere else to go from within the app.
What is good though, is that this is cross compatible, so I can use it on my Mac in a DAW like Reaper. This opens up some more possibilities, and I’m grateful for a few extra pretty nice sounding synths to play with in my DAW of choice, especially the drums which Reaper lacks as standard, but the same wall eventually hits, and I’m left wanting more functionality yet again. The internal compression is a bit too basic too, and it can’t be used with buses for example. Other plugins will allow for say the hats to be sent to a specific bus, separate from the other drum or synth buses, but also still send the compressed and sidechained / ducked audio output to that separate bus too. This won’t do that and will only send the compressed output to the main bus, which is pretty pointless from within Reaper or something, so while I like this feature, it’s not really useful if trying to expand past the basic quick demo that you might like initially. Sure I can do it with other apps and plugins, but it would be better to have this if it’s already there anyway.
Adding something like the ability to tweak drums more, or to use sampled drum hits too, or to automate or separately save various functions internally and more easily would be a start. What’s more frustrating is that these features are commonly found in other similar apps anyway, so it’s not like it’s not feasible or expected nowadays, so I really hope that future updates bring some more features just to keep this alive as I fear it might become something I don’t return to otherwise hence the stagnation feeling mentioned previously. If more features are added in future then it’s a clear 5 stars, but without that, the score might have to go even lower than the 4 star rating I have given it currently, because unfortunately the frustrated feeling of not being able to do more outweighs any benefits of the nice sound of the instruments (and they do sound really great!). I do like this app a lot though, so please keep going with this one, it’s got so much potential especially on macOS and within a DAW.
Now for the criticism that knocked a star off. The score was tough because on one hand I love this and it sounds great, but on the other there’s a lot missing that I feel will lead to the stagnation of this app in future. Like the generative options are cool and I get that the goal is to get you up and running with a track as quickly as possible, but what’s missing is the features or functionality for AFTER that process. The random generator is essentially just one knob that you pull up to throw something random in the mix. That’s cool and all but what are supposed to do after that? Or if you like something but want to edit it or expand it manually? Well as far as I can tell, you can’t really do that. There’s a cut feature and another knob which can partially wrangle the random notes, but no way to manually move the notes in a musical or sequencer based way as expected with other tools. This feels like such a shame because if I could do that, then I would be thinking this was one of the coolest apps that I’ve bought recently, but it can’t do I’m left frustrated with nowhere to go pretty quickly.
There’s little in the way of preset control either, and for example you can’t load a cool drum preset while loading a separate bass preset, it’s just one saved file for everything that only saves 5 max states within that you can’t edit, or even name, or tweak instruments separately, or in any way that I actually want or need to. It’s hard to describe but it’s not unlike using analog gear, with no preset function, so you can’t really easily change or save or revisit things well.
I do appreciate that you can send midi to this separately, and I use it with AUM with apps like LK Midi and Drambo to send notes to the different channels which the synths are listening on, but you can’t use any of the random generative features at the same time, and I am left wanting more functionality from within the app itself, or more buttons than are actually available. A synth sequencer for example would be great, and there’s one for drums but nothing else which leaves a hole for me, and I feel like I can start something interesting and with great sounding instruments, only to then eventually run into a wall with nowhere else to go from within the app.
What is good though, is that this is cross compatible, so I can use it on my Mac in a DAW like Reaper. This opens up some more possibilities, and I’m grateful for a few extra pretty nice sounding synths to play with in my DAW of choice, especially the drums which Reaper lacks as standard, but the same wall eventually hits, and I’m left wanting more functionality yet again. The internal compression is a bit too basic too, and it can’t be used with buses for example. Other plugins will allow for say the hats to be sent to a specific bus, separate from the other drum or synth buses, but also still send the compressed and sidechained / ducked audio output to that separate bus too. This won’t do that and will only send the compressed output to the main bus, which is pretty pointless from within Reaper or something, so while I like this feature, it’s not really useful if trying to expand past the basic quick demo that you might like initially. Sure I can do it with other apps and plugins, but it would be better to have this if it’s already there anyway.
Adding something like the ability to tweak drums more, or to use sampled drum hits too, or to automate or separately save various functions internally and more easily would be a start. What’s more frustrating is that these features are commonly found in other similar apps anyway, so it’s not like it’s not feasible or expected nowadays, so I really hope that future updates bring some more features just to keep this alive as I fear it might become something I don’t return to otherwise hence the stagnation feeling mentioned previously. If more features are added in future then it’s a clear 5 stars, but without that, the score might have to go even lower than the 4 star rating I have given it currently, because unfortunately the frustrated feeling of not being able to do more outweighs any benefits of the nice sound of the instruments (and they do sound really great!). I do like this app a lot though, so please keep going with this one, it’s got so much potential especially on macOS and within a DAW.
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