Fxpansion Guru

Beat guidance from Guru

Fxpansion is one of the leaders in the software beatbox market now with Guru. Guru comes complete with a number of powerful tools, it's designed to help you produce the beats you want with speed and ease. Fxpansion Guru can be used to create simple breaks or get crazy and produce intricate, multi-layered grooves. One feature is its powerful step sequencing, with each of its 8 engines having 16 MIDI-trigered sample pads which can be edited in a number of different ways. Guru also has built in effects that allow you to tweak your beats or completey transform them, while the mixer ensures that you can see, at a glance, what's happening with each engine.

Fxpansion's GURU also has a great beat slicing option. Slices are categorized as kick, snare, hi hat or percussion hits, and you can extract both individual hits and timing feel from your grooves. If you watn to use the software with your hardware controller, meanwhile, you can employ the built in MIDI mapping options.

Fxpansion Guru runs on both mac and pc, and can operate as a plug-in, over ReWire or standalone. A 2GB sample library is included, and the software should be available for around $199.00

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This review of Fxpansion Guru has been brought to you by computer music man