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Geist 'classic sequencer' style layout makes it an easy piece of kit to navigate.

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Back in 2005, FXpansion released a virtual drum machine called Guru. In many ways, it challenged convention, and hence it was adopted by a slew of name dance producers.

Geist replaces Guru in FXpansion's product line and is essentially its spiritual successor (though it's important to note that its code has been written from scratch).

It continues in the same vein, built as an all-in-one electronic drum solution where workflow rules all. Guru owners will take to it quickly. Geist deals with sampled loops and single hits. It comes with a super-high-quality sound library, featuring contributions from artists including Armin Van Buuren, D Ramirez and Sharooz.

"Just like Guru, Geist does a great job of capturing the subtle nuances of your groove."

It can slice loops into individual hits, for assignment to one of 16 pads. In fact, it can store up to eight samples per pad, with useful features such as velocity split and random trigger.

The pad concept is an evolution of that of popular hardware drum boxes like Akai's renowned MPC series. In Geist, each pad has a track in the pattern editor. The latter is both incredibly easy to use and sublimely detailed, featuring automation lanes in which you can twist up the sound by modulating several parameters, from pitch and velocity to send levels and pad effects settings.

Quality mixing tools are provided at pretty much every conceivable point in the signal chain, enabling you to polish your drum mix to a fine sheen. The internal effects sound as good - if not better - as those bundled with most DAWs, and there's no shortage of them either, with 30 to choose from.

Overloud's Breverb algorithms have been licensed for reverb modules, while FXpansion's DCAM circuit-modelling technology has been used on some of the saturation, compression and filter modules. It sounds surprisingly convincing, especially on the compressors.

Number crunching

24 patterns and a full set of 16 pads constitute an 'engine', of which there are eight. Think of it as eight instances of Geist, but all accessible from one interface and triggerable as the same MIDI device.

It means that you're unlikely to ever run out of pads or patterns, and makes more sense than having an enormous, unmanageable interface that you have to wrestle with to access its power.

Recording patterns via a MIDI controller (or even the mouse) gives a real 'hands-on' feel and, just like Guru, Geist does a great job of capturing the subtle nuances of your groove; unlike Guru, it has up to 1024 steps per pattern.

Recording in Geist is great fun and made easier by the new Retro Record functionality, which enables you to rescue rhythms you were jamming out even before you hit record.

How does this work? Well, Geist is essentially recording in the background at all times, so you can capitalise on those spontaneous ideas that pop out while you're just messing around.