Toontrack – Beatstation
Generally speaking
At its core, Beatstation marks the next step in Toontracks evolution of creating virtual instruments that are both simple and effective to use but also very powerful sound design & music production tools.
Offering drum, bass and lead instrument creation & arrangement with drag and drop simplicity, Beatstation is your “go to” instrument for quickly getting a full groove up and running in no time at all. As if thats not enough, weve also added full MIDI & REX file support. Couple those features with the flexibility of working in Beatstation as a stand alone instrument or an AU, RTAS or VST plugin inside your favorite DAW and Beatstation becomes a creative musical force to be reckoned with.
Beatstation comes standard with a 1.5 Gb core content library packed full of beautifully recorded instrument patches, loop ready REX files and even completely customizable MIDI arrangements.
If you can think of a sound, Beatstation can help you bring it to life.
Beatstation also lets you use and combine all of your existing Toontrack EZX & SDX drum libraries together to create one of a kind drum kits and sounds. From basic musical sketches to lavish complete productions – Beatstation gives you the tools and freedom to design your own musical agenda any way you want to.
Beatstation is something like Propellerheads Reason without Propeller. It’s a standalone/plugin tool for making/composing music. It can run REX files, recorded-files, drumsamples off each individual instrument to make a song.
The interface is pretty new, interesting to say at least. It’s very intuitive. If you listen to the pre-manufactured/preset songs, it sounds like one of your favourite dance-tracks.
As far as interfacing goes, it recognized my Korg K-49 keyboard without any additional installations or configuration changes. I was setup and started to make a song in Cubase, using Beatstation as an instrument. The pretty cool feature is, that you can drag&drop a rex into cubase, or a midi-file and edit it within cubase. It’s the same idea as their remarkable EZplayer, where you can drag&drop drum-midi tunes to your sequencer and edit it.
Problems
No problems occured. Installation went smooth, same as with activtion and using it. The manual is not very detailed, but that’s not necessary anyway.
Sound
The sound is spectacular. If you are a composer, this tool is the answer for instant idea creation. I used it to compose music for a B-movie. Normaly this task takes up to a day to get all the ideas work well together. With beatstation I had something within an hour.
You can use external samples and midi-files as well as Rex-files. If you use Chicken-Translator you are the man (or girl).
Conclusion
Buy it. This thing kills. Any other software I used always took me a lot of time to get into it. With Beatstation you really become part of the song/sound.