Recording - April 2011 - 22

FXpansion Geist

been sending to are set up pre- or post-fader, and there’s a Master output with its own set of effects. All of that data becomes a Preset. This is a mind-boggling level of detail. One Preset holds eight Engines, which is eight Kits, 192 Patterns, 128 Pads, 1024 Layers, and as many as 7000 effects...! Now, before you panic: this level of modularity is not present so you can use all of it at once! Think of Geist as the equivalent of a recording studio with a large mixer and a very welldesigned patch bay. Everything is in place so that you can quickly place a sound, layer, or effect exactly where you want it, without having to compromise: “Oh well, I guess I’ll have to slap the compressor across all my Layers in this Pad, even though only one Layer needs it.” That’s true of everything in Geist: there’s seemingly a lot of redundancy, but that leads to you never having to make annoying choices as to where to best do things—you can almost always apply the treatment you want at the level you want. The Browser One of GURU’s least favorite features of mine was its file retrieval system: it worked and offered a lot of options, but it was cramped, cryptic, and I constantly got lost looking for stuff. Geist has a totally overhauled Browser, easily hidden with a click of an icon, that is larger, easier to read, neatly organized, and full of handy tricks to speed your sound selection, audition, and import processes. You can not only search on simple or complex combinations of criteria, but you can name and save your searches in a clickable list. The same is true of particular folders, which can be remembered as Favourites. Geist shows you all of your attached disk drives, several default locations like your Desktop (as good starting points to drill down and find libraries), and a wonderful new feature called Shortlists. As you hunt around for material, you can drag items down to a special area where they form a Shortlist. Items can include sound files, loops, pattern data, etc. This lets you quickly assemble materials from all over your sound library disks in one place... and if you wish, you can name and save the Shortlist for future reference. Way cool! You can set options like one-click auditioning, enabling or disabling the Slicer from working on files as you choose them, automatically
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loading files into Geist when they’re clicked so you can do more detailed examinations, and more. You can even set your preview audio to go to a different set of interface outputs, in case you want to hunt for sounds over headphones while sending audio to a PA system during a live show.

Among the more fun features in the Slicer is Classify, where Geist listens to the audio in the loop being sliced and attempts to determine whether a particular slice contains a bass, snare, hi-hat, or percussion sound. It then color-codes these slices and allocates them to appropriate Pad Rows in a Kit for a musical playback experience. It does a very good job with conventional drum loops, and its guesses when fed nontraditional material like voices or orchestral percussion can be interesting and inspiring. The Sampler A pet peeve of my esteemed Editor is a habit some software makers have of calling programs “samplers” when they can’t actually sample (i.e. record audio directly rather than importing files). That’s not a problem here: the sampling system built into Geist is one of the best I’ve seen recently, and while it’s optimized for creating loops, Pads, and full Kits, there are enough features in it so you could create playable virtual keyboard instruments from your input. You can sample audio from outside Geist via an audio interface, from inside the program (resampling from the Masters or from any of up to 16 assignable output pairs), or—for users of DAWs where audio recording directly into a plug-in may not be directly supported—from a little plugin called Spitter, which comes free with Geist and is installed alongside it. You drop Spitter into the effects chain of a DAW channel where you’ll be recording your audio, and Spitter can route it into Geist for sampling. You can set up Geist to sample for a specific time period, respond to Start/Stop commands or listen to audio going above and below specific thresholds, or simply to record when you hit the red button. Each audio recording is held in RAM as a Take, and sets of Takes can quickly be assigned to sets of Pads in a Kit. Play a series of sounds separated by silence, click one button, and you have a Kit all ready to play! Sequencing features Geist’s Patterns are familiar to anyone who’s worked with drum machines; you can paint in hits for any Pad in a Kit over a grid that can be anywhere from 16 to 1024 steps long. It’s easy to copy, duplicate, etc., and each Pad can have multiple automation lanes for parameters like velocity, pan, filter settings, sample start point, repeats (for stutter effects), time shift (to produce subtle “feel” alterations), and aux bus send amount for dub effects like sending a particular beat out for a burst of delay or reverb.

Slicing and dicing The Slicer is a built-in feature that lets you quickly chop up loops into rearrangeable slices based on markers. You can set the sensitivity of the Slicer to provide more or fewer hits at transients in the loop, or simply

subdivide the audio file at evenly divided points. The Slicer places each slice onto a Pad in a Kit (and can do so on multiple layers if there are more than 16 slices), and generates a Pattern where each slice is played back one at a time as a starting point; you then have a full range of playback options that would be familiar to anyone who’s worked with ReCycle and REX/RX2 files.

Recording - April 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2011