MusicRadar

• Review

Under the skin

You might be thinking that Beatstation is very much a beginners' tool, but if you look below the surface, it's surprisingly capable. Open a pad's Properties window and you'll find some fairly powerful sound design features - up to five samples can be layered on each pad simply by dragging and dropping, and each layer can be tweaked individually.

The likes of volume, ADSR, pan and pitch can be adjusted, and there are reverse and offset options, making it quick and easy to build up layered sounds.

There's no dedicated filtering or EQ, but you get one insert effect slot per pad, for which EQ/filters are an option.

In standalone mode, you can record your samples via the built-in recorder.

Recording and sampling

Although Beatstation doesn't have its own sequencer, when you're running it in standalone mode, it does boast a sound recorder and editor, and this proves to be very easy to use.

Once you've opened the dedicated window, you simply select your audio input, hit the record button and make some noise. Once you've recorded your sounds, you can normalise the resulting audio file, crop it to remove any unwanted silence and adjust the fade handles. Drag the audio file onto a pad and it instantly becomes one of said pad's layers.

It's also worth noting that if you do this with a melodic sound and you put it on either the Bass or Lead pad, you can tell Beatstation what note it is, so the software can pitch it across the keyboard.

The patches you can generate in this way might not be up to velocity-layered, multisampled standard, but if you want an incredibly quick and easy way of creating playable sounds, you've got it.

Handily, this also works with your own imported samples and REX slices, giving you more flexibility, though it would have been nice if the software could automatically detect pitch, as this would help beginners who might not necessarily know anything about musical notes.

Then there's that REX file player. As well as being able to play back REX files, you can also drag a complete REX file onto a pad, or just a slice from it. So, if you just want to use one hit from a loop in your drum kit, it's easy to get at it.

The MIDI file player offers velocity, swing, drum flam and transpose controls. You can drag and drop MIDI parts from Beatstation onto tracks in your DAW, or convert them to audio.

Plug in a MIDI keyboard and you'll find that the lower register plays the bass instrument, the middle area fires off the pads and the upper octaves are dedicated to your lead sound.

The downside is that the mapping is fixed so you can't, for example, plug in a drum pad controller and assign the pads as you want them.

When you're using Beatstation as a plug-in in your DAW, there's just a single stereo output, which won't please those who want each sound popping up on a different DAW channel for easy mixing and application of plug-in effects.

So, how to sum up Beatstation? The more you use it, the more potential uses spring to mind. There's plenty for anyone who wants a quick groove or an easy way of building a layered and processed custom drum kit.

That said, beginners might be put off by the fact that it's not a self-contained production package, while pros will bemoan the lack of comprehensive controller support and multiple outputs.

The documentation is also flimsy, consisting of a few annotated images pointing out what the interface does, plus some videos on the website.

Ultimately, it's hard to say exactly what you will find it useful for - if anything - until you actually give it a go, and unfortunately there's no demo. For some users, it will feel like less than the sum of its parts, while others will find that it slots seamlessly into their workflow.

Listen to a few examples of Beatstation's sounds:

Lowbit - Step1 kit

Organic - DC kit

Synthetic - Krush kit