Groove Menus have been around for quite awhile and have appeared on many Spectrasonics products, even in our sample libraries before we released Stylus RMX.
A Groove Menu is essentially a single Patch or Part containing a collection of related grooves at the same tempo, with one groove assigned to a different MIDI note of the keyboard. There are a couple of advantages to this approach of working:
• It’s easy to layer and mix grooves together by playing multiple keys.
• You can also play different grooves at different times in the song, making the process of constructing a linear groove track on a single channel much easier than doing the same thing multitimbrally with several parts.
What’s different about the way SAGE handles Groove Menus is that we use a special Groove Menu MIDI mode, which makes every Groove element in a Suite play in a Groove Menu style layout.
There are a number of significant advantages of the “Groove Menu MIDI Mode” style approach.
• EVERY Suite works automatically as a Groove Menu just by switching the MIDI mode.
• Users can easily create their own Groove Menus by using the Favorites system.
• With SAGE technology, all the Grooves are always in sync with the host’s tempo.
Watch the Introduction video tutorial for musical demonstrations of using Groove Menus and be sure to check out Time Designer in Groove Menu Mode, too.
