Individual Cells can output to any of four group busses or 32 direct outs for collective processing, and send to global reverb and delay effects and a variety of MIDI processors enable tweaking of velocity response, automatic triggering of drum rudiments and other articulations, humanising and more.

Each one of up to 128 colourable ‘Cells’ (pads) houses one or more velocity-layered samples, and affords access to a plethora of editing and processing parameters, including timestretching, saturation and vintage sampler emulation, compression, transient shaping, EQ and filtering, tuning, panning and modulation. Whether you’re after a thoroughly convincing Minimoog or Roland TR-808, a Urei 1176 compressor or a granular sample mangling effect, there’ll be at least a handful of viable options out there to suit your creative needs and budget.The original ‘serious’ sample-based software drum instrument and still very much one of the best, Battery 4 is our only list entrant that doesn’t include any form of onboard sequencing – it’s all about racking up, processing and mixing samples for MIDI triggering standalone or in-DAW. There are literally thousands of amazing free and paid-for examples available in both categories, from emulations of pretty much every classic hardware synth and effect unit ever made, to mind-blowing new designs that could never exist in physical form. It was quickly followed by a handful of rival plugin standards, which today comprise Apple’s Mac-only Audio Units (AU), Avid’s Pro Tools-only AAX and RTAS.Ī plugin effect is a signal processing device such as a reverb, delay, compressor or EQ, while plugin instruments take in, amongst other things, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and sample-based recreations of real-world guitars, drum kits, pianos, etc. Enabling anyone with the requisite coding chops to create virtual effects and, a few years later, instruments for use as ’plugin’ modules within any compatible DAW, VST at last realised the dream of the entirely-software studio and kickstarted a whole new industry almost overnight.

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