Geist2

In electronic dance music, drums are of the utmost importance. They represent the essence of songs, even in more melodic genres, like trance or hardstyle, because the drums have the mission to get the crowd moving way before the leads come in. You may have also heard tracks that rely solely on the power of their kick drums.

It’s safe to say that, in order to create good dance music, you not only need to develop powerful drums but also create engaging drum patterns that make up your song’s structure. To achieve this, you could start from scratch, or you could use a program such as Geist2.

Firstly, you should know that any DAW allows you to create powerful drums from scratch using basic MIDI sounds and adjusting parameters. In fact, it’s one of the first things producers learn. But Geist2 is almost like a DAW in its own right. It works not only as a plugin but also as a stand-alone program. And even though it’s focused on creating drum patterns, it also comes with plenty of other melodic sounds that enable you to sketch your tracks, or even complete them if you’re going for a more minimal approach to your production.

That being said, Geist2 is nothing but minimal. Its interface may actually seem a bit counterintuitive at first, especially if you’re not used to controlling so many parameters.

Since Geist2 is, essentially, a drum machine, its core feature is the drum pad. You can begin by assigning sounds to each of the pads, and then start working on your composition. Later you can adjust parameters such as filters, envelopes, or low-frequency oscillators and decide if they improve your mix. You can even slice sounds and assign the individual slices to your pads.

Without going into too many details, I can conclude that Geist2 is a powerful tool for designing catchy beats.