FXpansion GURU - Manual (Page 12)

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CHAPTER ONE
GURU: Fundamental Philosophy
1:1 Engines, Pads, Patterns and Graphs
These concepts are crucial to the way that GURU works, so
it’s very useful to read through the following descriptions.
Engines
GURU is made up of 8 ‘Engines’. Each of these Engines
contains 16 Pads. Although these Pads can be sequenced
from your host sequencer using MIDI notes, they can also be
controlled by each Engine’s advanced step sequencer system.
There are sequencers for Pads (the Pattern view) and for
modulating certain sound parameters (the Graph view). An
Engine is essentially an independent entity with its own MIDI
channel (they respond to channels 1-8), although the tempo of
all Engines is locked to multiples of Engine 1’s tempo.
Each Engine also has 3 Aux effects and an Insert effect. There
is also a Master Insert effect which affects the entire Master
output.
Pads
The 16 Pads inside each of GURU’s Engines are categorized
into Kicks, Snares, Hihats and Percussion, with 4 Pads as-
signed to each type. This is central to SmartSlicing: GURU’s
intuitive new approach to loop-slicing.
Each Pad is a sophisticated sampler with a substantial array of
parameters that can be adjusted in the Pad Edit view, which is
a tweaker’s paradise. You can layer (either stacked or velocity-
layered with crossfades) up to 8 samples on a single Pad, ad-
just start/end points, gain, pan, pitch and filtering, add one of
the built-in effects or adjust send levels to any of the 3 Engine
Aux effects. There are also 2 envelopes to play with in the Pad
Edit view: one for amplitude and one for filter cutoff, pitch and
certain effects destinations.
The Pads are mapped to MIDI notes C1 to D#2 by default.
Patterns
The Pattern view is for step-sequencing Pads. The sequencer
can have up to 4 pages, each with up to 32 steps, giving a to-
tal of up to 128 steps. Each sequence is called a Pattern: each
Engine in GURU has 24 Patterns, assigned to MIDI keys from
C3 to B4. Click on the Pattern keys, or hit the corresponding
MIDI key, to access any of the 24 Patterns for each Engine.