FXpansion Geist is the company’s new sampling instrument.
Instead of making a polished marketing video, FXpansion says “We decided to spend our time making some music, using only Geist and a few instruments we had lying around.
Check it out and let us know what you think of FXpansion’s new Geist sampling instrument!
Details below.
Description:
Geist fuses creative sample-sculpting tools with fast pattern step-sequencing and arrangement. Browse through sounds with lightning speed, slice and assign loops to pads with a single click; sample, resample and build beats in a slick unified environment. Geist makes fiddly tasks with multiple apps a thing of the past.
Geist runs as a plug-in and as a standalone application, perfect for laptop beatmaking. Export creations as audio clips or load sessions back into the plug-in to resample, reslice, remix, rearrange and transform your beats even further.
Features:
- Sampling & resampling.
- Dirac3™ time-stretch / pitch-shift.
- Powerful full-featured slicing & hit detection.
- 30+ effect types inc. DCAM circuit modeled filters / dynamics / drive & Overloud Breverb™.
- Pattern sequencing.
- Scene switching.
- Integrated song mode.
- Real-time record & retro capture.
- Step-automation for parameters.
- Intuitive and powerful browser.
- Full MIDI and audio export.
- Standalone / VST / AU / RTAS.
- Exclusive sounds & presets from Armin van Buuren, D. Ramirez, Dom Kane, KJ Sawka, Goldbaby, Groove Criminals, Portion Control and more.
Geist is available now as a download-only product, priced at $249 . Registered FXpansion GURU owners can crossgrade for $125.
Well, the song was pretty terrible, but the instrument itself looks very cool indeed =)
Many people seem to compare Gheist with Maschine and as such discussions seem to pop up on many forums about one being better than the other.
Personally I don't favor either (more than happy with Live+ & my APC40) but I think the comparisons are quite off. Not bad-mouthing Geist here but having looked seriously into Maschine I think the comparison as a whole is flawed since Maschine comes with both software and hardware.
Where obviously (at least that's how I see it) Maschine has the advantage in that it not only has native features for recording, "slicing & dicing" and such but can *also* be used in combination with whatever DAW you're used to. (please correct me if I'm wrong; my information is solely based on what I picked up on the NI website and the several forum threads). The big part here is that its not merely trying to 'replace' options in your DAW but more tries to enhance on it (this is where the hardware comes in).
Geist on the other hand looks like more like a plugin to me which does seem to focus entirely on replacing those recording/slicing aspects in a DAW (instead of the DAW you'd be using Geist, at least that's what I make of all this).
And solely based on the video's I've seen so far I'd have some doubts. No doubts about the workflow; some of it looks very slick indeed. Like the part where he's slicing and does a playback on a per-slice only. I don't think I can do that just as easy in Live.
But if you're already the kind of person who wants to use the key features of many different programs, and as such do a little bit of "hopping around" I'd seriously wonder what the better deal is. Sure; this piece of software is most likely going to be a lot cheaper than something as Maschine (E 700,- vs Guru (afaik Geist is going to replace this?) for E 119,-).
But in comparison software like this only gives you an extra extension in your workflow to utilize whereas stuff like Maschine can give you a standard workflow which easily fits all the software you're currently using anyway.
I think these are very rough times for software plugins like these.. Just my 2 cents though.
From the video I get the impression that Ableton Live does everything that Geist does (including the slicing to a new MIDI track so you can rearrange individual slices and so on). Maybe its raison d'être is to give people who use a DAW (or several) that does not have these or comparable features easy access to this kind of workflow. Maybe a polished marketing video would have been able to highlight features that are unique to Geist or at least make clear who would want to look into Geist.
looks like an entry-level Ableton Live to me. Competition never hurts, though
My thought is exactly, I would have preferred a "polished" video that shows whats different and better in Geist than Guru itself or the other competitors.
For me, If some software like Live can give similar functionalities, they do miss the MPC-like (read easy to translate ideas into song ) workflow of Geist.
Quite limited but powerful in the end.
I think to sell my 3000 now, and just keeping the good ol’ Emax S950 and S760 for their sound.
I really wish Geist will be able to output midi events…