They lend themselves to quick jams, and you owe it to yourself to try one at least once. The great strength of grooveboxes, be they hardware or software, has always been the speed with which you can build up patterns. The positives return, though, with Groove Machine's sequencer. Even when fully loaded with your own drum samples, the under-powered synths let Groove Machine down. There are some interesting and cool drum sounds, just as in sister instrument Drumaxx, but whereas that is a quirky drum machine playing a part in a broader sonic tapestry, Groove Machine is designed for producing entire grooves.
The rest of the preset grooves show up the limitations none of the dubstep, acid or supposedly ballsy synths quite make the grade. There are lots of useful, posh-sounding big-room percussive noises for pop and dance. Take a quick listen to any of the excellent presets by Toby Emerson and you will hear how nice Groove Machine can sound. If you make progressive-sounding genres, there are plenty of cool sounds and grooves to get you going. Unfortunately, in respect of the sample-based patches and other presets, Groove Machine is amixed bag. Groove Machine certainly offers sampling - and acquits itself quite well in this respect - but in any plug-in of this type, the battery of included sounds is still very important. In times gone by, the measure of a groovebox was its built-in sounds, but as soon as you could throw sampling into the mix, the interface and tools became more important. Image-Line has really missed a trick by not offering an effects-only version of the plug-in, however. The fantastic sidechaining effect, panner and some brilliant LFO-driven filters are also highlights.
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.
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