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About The New Beatmaker

Hi!  I'm Lee.  Welcome to my blog.  Here we talk music: news, reviews, interviews, tips, tutorials and more.  I'm also working on the upcoming podcast  Influenced  as a guest, writer and researcher alongside music aficionado Mark Williams and friends.  Watch this space! I have been a lover of music for as long as I can remember, an amateur lyricist for 25 years, a music writer for 15 years and a hobbyist musician and blogger for almost 10 years. My tastes range from jazz to house to hip hop and I love helping artists from all genres develop their sound. My music, videos, reviews and interviews have been featured in a variety of magazines and websites, including: B-Boy Tech Report Gimme That Beat Humanhuman Audio Skills Dream House Beats Where Did the Road Go Beat Tape Co-Op Push Power Promo Drum Magazine You can find my music on Bandcamp: Monkey Mind Sounds AKA LeeTNB And you can find me on Facebook: The New Beatmaker page Lee's personal page

saintjoe Arturia SparkLE Hybrid Drum Machine Review / SPARK Software Engine 1.6.1




saintjoe from SoundsAndGear checks out the SparkLE Hybrid drum maschine / controller from Arturia.  SparkLE is one of the products that caught his eye at the NAMM show, as he mentioned in our recent in-depth interview with him, so it's good to see him put it through its paces in this video review.

The SPARK software has just been updated.  From Arturia themselves:
Arturia is proud to release Version 1.6.1 of SPARK, the latest software update to its SPARK Creative Drum Machine and SparkLE Creative Drum Machine hybrid hardware/software beat production centres, on March 25...

Quite simply, SPARK Creative Drum Machine revolutionised hands-on beat-making by cleverly combining TAE® (True Analog Emulation) synthesis, sample playback (with multiple layering modes and post- processing), and physical modelling technologies with the intuitive workflow of a hardware drum machine upon its June 2011 launch; NAMM 2013 subsequently saw Arturia taking this concept to the masses by introducing SparkLE Creative Drum Machine, an all-new, ultra-portable package sharing the same SPARK software engine.

Now, thanks to Version 1.6.1 of that already super-smart SPARK software engine, Arturia has improved the functionality of both SPARK Creative Drum Machine and SparkLE Creative Drum Machine as follows.

Firstly, SparkLE Creative Drum Machine owners benefit from an added accent button in the GUI and an added latch mode for the instrument FX Pad, which, when activated, assigns the P1 and P2 knobs to the instrument parameters (Volume/Pan, Cutoff Resonance, Aux1/Aux2), while pressing any of the three XY Instrument buttons turns off latch mode (returning the P1 and P2 knobs to their previous assignations).

Joint benefits also abound for SPARK Creative Drum Machine and SparkLE Creative Drum Machine users, including improving the MIDI Clock output, together with several bug fixes.

So, thanks to those Version 1.6.1 improvements, the time has truly come to ignite rhythmic creativity with SPARK Creative Drum Machine and SparkLE Creative Drum Machine. Super-size beat-making with the original or add a little sparkle? The choice is out there!

The SPARK Version 1.6.1 update can be downloaded directly for free from here: www.arturia.com/evolution/en/downloads/updates.html
SPARK and SparkLE can be purchased from the Arturia online store (www.arturia.com/evolution/en/buy/online-shop.html) or any dealer for €399.00 EURO/$399.00 USD or €249.00 EURO/$299.00 USD, respectively.

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Video: SoundsAndGear.com
Image: Arturia.com

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About The New Beatmaker

Hi!  I'm Lee.  Welcome to my blog.  Here we talk music: news, reviews, interviews, tips, tutorials and more.  I'm also working on the upcoming podcast  Influenced  as a guest, writer and researcher alongside music aficionado Mark Williams and friends.  Watch this space! I have been a lover of music for as long as I can remember, an amateur lyricist for 25 years, a music writer for 15 years and a hobbyist musician and blogger for almost 10 years. My tastes range from jazz to house to hip hop and I love helping artists from all genres develop their sound. My music, videos, reviews and interviews have been featured in a variety of magazines and websites, including: B-Boy Tech Report Gimme That Beat Humanhuman Audio Skills Dream House Beats Where Did the Road Go Beat Tape Co-Op Push Power Promo Drum Magazine You can find my music on Bandcamp: Monkey Mind Sounds AKA LeeTNB And you can find me on Facebook: The New Beatmaker page Lee's personal page
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