CONCEPTS - Groove Menus

 

Groove Menus have been around for quite awhile and have appeared on many Spectrasonics products, even on our sample libraries before the Stylus series of virtual instruments.

 

A Groove Menu is essentially a single patch or part containing a collection of related grooves at the same tempo, with one groove assigned to a different MIDI note of the keyboard. There are a couple of advantages to this approach of working:

 

• It's possible to perform the collection of grooves together in an intuitive and musical way from a MIDI controller. This makes it very easy to layer and mix grooves together by playing multiple keys.

 

• You can also effortlessly play different grooves at different times in the song, making the process of constructing a linear groove track on a single channel/part much easier than doing the same thing multitimbrally with several parts.

 

What's different about the way SAGE handles Groove Menus is that we no longer use specific Groove Menu patches. Instead, we use a special Groove Menu MIDI mode, which makes every Groove element in a Suite play in a Groove Menu style layout.

 

There are a number of significant advantages of this new “Groove Menu MIDI mode” style approach compared to the old way we used to do it on sample libraries and with Classic Stylus:

 

• Special patches do not have to be created in order to achieve the Groove Menu result.

 

• EVERY suite automatically works as a Groove Menu just by switching the MIDI mode!

 

• Users can quickly and easily create their own Groove Menus by using the Favorites system.

 

• With SAGE technology, special patches for different tempos are no longer necessary, all the Grooves are automatically always in sync and at the correct tempo with the host!

 

HINT: Check out the really cool “Example Groove Menus” sound directory in the Core Library, while you're in Groove Menu MIDI Mode. It's full of interesting examples of how to use Groove Menus that will make a lot of sense to you once you try them!

 

REFERENCE: Read the MIDI Modes chapter for more information.

 

VIDEO: Watch the "Introduction" video tutorial for musical demonstrations of using Groove Menus.

 

VIDEO: Make sure you check out Time Designer in Groove Menu Mode too!