Gross Beat: Do The Mash!

Gross Beat is an intelligent musical effects plug-in designed to emulate many IDM audio effects in real-time, such as: DJ scratches, spinback, stutter effects, beat repeats, gating, glitches and other creative time-manipulation effects. Gross Beat’s audio engine continuously captures an audio signal as a rolling buffer into two-bar phrases. A playback cursor in the form of a green line, pertaining to Gross Beat’s two-bar buffer, moves linear from left to right across the plugin’s interface known as the ‘Envelope Mapping Panel’. Sound is twisted into a series of stutters, glitches, repeats e.t.c by designing shapes using multi-point envelopes to control the two main parameters/sections of Gross Beat – ‘Time’ (Green section) & ‘Volume’ (Orange section).

Envelopes: Multi-point envelopes are a prominent feature for controlling parameters in many of Image-Line’s plugins including Gross Beat. The concept of envelopes in Gross Beat is simple – the shape of an envelope modifies the

sound in the two-bar audio buffer at any given time.

Gross Beat provides a host of different envelope shapes to choose from for creating simple repeat patterns, or for combining multiple shapes to trigger complex sonic treatments of a sound. Different envelope shapes are accessed by right clicking an envelope time-line and choosing from the context menu. Shapes are then physically mapped out at predetermined points across the ‘Envelope Mapping Panel’. You will find options to map ‘Single curve’ envelopes, ‘Smooth’ or ‘Stair’ envelopes plus many more, all of which, can be manipulated in great detail to create awesome volume & time-based effects. You can also call up your loop library to provide inspiration when sound designing in Gross Beat because the plug-in will load and analyse audio files to create new envelopes based on the audio transients – which is a such powerful feature.

Presets: Gross Beat provides 6 preset catagories: Turntablist – Stutter – Pitch Shifting – Patterns – Momentary and Flanging. Each catagory supplies an indepth collection of envelope mapped presets which emulate classic DJ styles ranging from: Backspin – Deck On/Off – Rhythmic Scratch effects – Beat Juggling – Fades – Vinyl On/Push/Stop effects and a whole bunch more. A careful study of how the presets work will clearly demonstrate the many sound

variations made possible using multi-point envelopes in Gross Beat.

Slots & Performance: Each of the two sections (Time & Volume) provide 36 user defined preset slots into which sound shaping envelope designs can be stored and saved as presets. Pre-assigning and triggering Gross Beat’s preset slots via external MIDI control is made easy with a simple right-click and choosing from the options there. In a ‘Live’ performance environment Gross Beat is superb. Once a chain of presets are assigned to MIDI, Gross Beat becomes an instrument in its own right as sound altering envelope patterns are easily switched on the fly. Endless streams of fills and variations can be achieved through Gross Beat’s note release behaviour which determines how a pattern returns to a previous slot, stays at its current slot or moves forward. The ability to mix the wet/dry signals of both the Time & Volume sections and use MIDI CC to control certain parameters defines Gross Beat as a highly versatile effects plugin.

Outro: All in all, Gross Beat is a slick and cool sounding effects plugin that is easy to use and one that excels in a performance environment. Exploring the endless twists and turns of sound manipulation using the indepth quality of the Gross Beat’s preset banks is both refreshing and inspiring. As a fully MIDI compatible plug-in, Gross Beat provides a well designed feature set which translates into a powerful resource for improvisation with limitless audio mashing capability.

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