MusicRadar

Groove Machine's well-featured interface looks the part.

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• Review

For a generation of producers who have grown up with DAWs, it's hard to imagine a time when you couldn't download the exact same tools that your idols use and get busy with them in your own productions.

But back in the '90s, each piece of kit cost hundreds or even thousands of pounds, so the all-in-one "groovebox" units from the likes of Roland were an attractive way of getting started.

They offered drums, synths, sampling (eventually) and step-sequencing that was popularised by classic 80s machines. In reality, though, none of the tracks you bought or heard in the club were made on grooveboxes - their digital sounds, processing and mixing simply did not sound good enough back then.

"Despite a large range of waveforms and a healthy supply of presets to showcase them, Groove Machine's synth sounds just don't have any real balls or bite."

However, now that we find ourselves in a world of super-fast computer processing, perhaps it's time to revisit the concept? It seems that Image-Line thinks so…

Groove Machine looks the business, certainly. It offers eight drum/sample channels (each with four sample layers), five hybrid synths (each with multimode filters, three oscillators, two LFOs and two envelopes), 10 effects per channel, stutter and reverse, eight 8-bar patterns, per-step automation, full MIDI control,multiple outputs, VST/AU instrument orstandalone operation and a piano roll step and automation editor. Phew!

Let's talk about drums first. Each of the four sample layers can be edited, offset, reversed, filtered and have envelope controls applied independently, making this a pretty formidable tool. The samples are fairly good, with some characterful examples reminiscent of another Image-Line plug-in, the excellent Drumaxx.

Next come the synths, and this is where we start to feel some traditional groovebox limitations. Despite a large range of waveforms and a healthy supply of presets to showcase them, the sounds just don't have any real balls or bite.

You can make some uninspiring trance or passable pop-progressive house, but when it comes to the kind of driving filth that permeates almost every contemporary electronic genre, Groove Machine is lacking. This is a shame, as the unit makes LFO-driven dubsteppy wuh-wuh-wobbles a breeze to program.

As for the effects, they're great. All 10 performance effects are fun and very usable, and the slicing and reversing tools are so uniformly excellent that we actually found ourselves loading in sliced loops of tracks, just so we could use its performance tools to create glitch edits.

The fantastic sidechaining effect, panner and some brilliant LFO-driven filters are also highlights. Image-Line has really missed a trick by not offering an effects-only version of the plug-in, however.