When it was released, Guru looked at a glance like it could bring salvation to the beat makers around the world. With 1.5 a lot had happened and tons of features were added. Let’s find out if it’s worth loosing your MPC.

Basic understanding

Guru is made up out of eight engines which corresponds to different MIDI channels. Each engine has a step sequencer and a 4×4 ‘pad board’ (that’s sixteen, in case you suck at math). The only thing these engines have in common is that they are locked to the same tempo. At your disposal is also three auxes, one insert and a master insert.

The pads are reminiscent of old samplers. They are labeled 1-4 and as either kick, snare, hi-hat or percussion. These pads are empty at startup but can be loaded with sounds. They can also be layered and in turn be triggered in various ways. The way you load them is through the browser to the left of the pads. The browser has four tabs: patterns, kits, pads and loops, which in turn contains the sounds. Kits loads the entire set of pads with sounds, pads contains sounds that you add to a specific pad, patterns just adds patterns to the pattern editor but no sounds, while loops loads both sounds to the pads and patterns to the pattern editor. There are also a couple of different import options in the browser, these changes depending on which tab you’re on. For instance, you can choose to slice loops differently, you can import just the pattern from a loop and so on.

The pattern editor is a step sequencer which can have from one to 32 steps in four pages, which basically can let a pattern have 128 steps. On top of that each engine can have a total of 24 patterns. It is possible to switch between patterns either by mouse or MIDI input.

Underneath the pattern editor is a couple of tabs for different windows. First there is the tab for the pattern window itself, next to it is the graphs window. Here we find Gurus own Deluxe Paint (anyone remember that? I’ll send you a free ice cream by mail if you do!). You can choose among many graphs for all the different pads, including velocity, pan, filters, repeat, reverse, pitch etc. In other words, you can make a kick sound like a C64 robot if you want to. Just draw something nice in the graph.

Next to this is the pad edit window button. This is of course a sample editor. It has a fair amount of options, including various envelopes, tuning, panning, cut-offs, reverse, gate, etc. Next to that is the aux effects section. Guru includes a lot of effects actually, from the standards such as compressor, reverb, and delay, to many different LFOs, EQs and what-nots.

The next window tab is the one for Gurus built-in mixer. It is designed in such a way that each channel is one engine. There is also a master fader. This is also where you apply the master effects (one per engine). The two final windows is the options window (which shouldn’t need any explanation) and the scenes window. Scenes are controlled most easy via MIDI. What you do is that you take a “snapshot” of a pattern, the snapshot (the scene) can then be triggered by the corresponding MIDI key.

Beat in the making

Guru can seem a little overwhelming in that there’s so many options and windows but I find it rather pleasant to work in. The manual is good, and having it open making the first beat helps a lot. The interface is OK, it looks a little like Ableton Live actually, but at times it can get a little too flashy for my taste. There’s also a lot of windows to keep track of, but they seem necessary so I don’t really see how FXpansion could have done it differently. Guru is almost like a DAW in a DAW. In the same way as Structure or Kontakt 3 by themselves can supply a songwriter with a complete set of tools, so can Guru almost do for a beat maker.

You can draw, play or edit pre-made patterns in the pattern window. There are plenty of samples included and they can be tweaked in all kind of ways. With a few single controls you can then apply many variations and any amount of groove quantizing that you like. My personal work flow with Guru is to record a pattern in real-time, it works really well. I’ll loop a fixed amount of steps and just jam. If I don’t like it I just click ‘undo’, and if I do like it I use the ‘commit’ button. ‘Commit’ basically let’s you continue recording and undo your next steps instead of the ones you’ve committed. You don’t have to pause between all this. If I record more than one pattern, I then assign them to MIDI keys to play them back in real-time.

If you want to know more about how Guru works in practice, then check out the videos on Fxpansions website.

When I first looked in the manual I was very excited to see that Guru had a lot of clever shortcuts. Unfortunately, if you use Guru in Pro Tools many of these won’t work. I assume this is because the functions are overridden by Pro Tools. Actually, Guru would’ve been possible to control almost entirely without the mouse since most functions can (and already are) mapped to either QWERTY keyboard keys or MIDI signals.

Too bad for me and the various RSI victims out there as well. But luckily there are a lot of upsides to Guru as well. One sweet thing is that you can simply click ‘n’ drag any pattern to any free MIDI or instrument track if you for some obscure reason don’t like the step sequencer and would prefer the Pro Tools MIDI editor. Or if you like me like to create a groove from one instrument (i.e. a drum kit) and turn it into something completely different (i.e. a bass line).

The random slider is another cool and new feature in 1.5 that can randomize pretty much anything you’ve highlighted in any of the windows, from the hi-hat lane in the sequencer to the pan on the clap in the graph window or all kinds of strange parameters in the pad edit window. Sweet! Like creativity on can!

Conclusion

If you think that I’ve talked about everything you can do with Guru then you’re badly mistaken. The things I’ve talked about have not been detailed either. This is only because Guru is so feature-filled that I’d have to write a way longer review for you to understand the depths of it. Instead I’ve talked about the essentials, and if this product interests you, then you should head over to FXpansions website right away and check it out. Guru could easily be a stand-alone application and well worth the investment for beat makers. Having the ability to use it as a plug-in makes it even better. The major downside is that the shortcuts won’t work (at least not in the DAWs I’ve tried it in). However, it’s presence will make any DAW instantly more powerful. What more can I say? Bravo FXpansion!

FXpansion