I have had Groove Agent SE as part of Cubase for years and really didn’t do much with it. It is now packaged with Dorico 5, so I spent some time with it today. My goal was to drag a few simple bossa nova patterns into my Dorico project.
Maybe I don’t understand the UI, but I couldn’t find anything of a Latin nature that wasn’t frantic techno speed. Almost everything I saw was geared to rock. My questions are:
Am I missing something in GA SE?
Is the full Groove Agent package any broader in its musical coverage? I really couldn’t find any information about the patterns that might be in the full product.
I do have a license for Addictive Drums and a few of their loop packs, and that works about the same as GA, but has more patterns that are useful to me.
Before I give up on GA, I just want to know if I am overlooking something important.
There is not much in GASE as included in Dorico. But you will find some Latin jazz patterns in the Simon Phillips pack. That pack is somewhat expensive ($80-ish) but you can get a free license for 30 days to try it out. And you don’t need the full Groove Agent. You can use that pack with GASE.
One of the things that throws me off is that I can’t get the “Half” or “Double” buttons to do anything as far as playing the patterns. No matter what I do, they play at the same speed. The package would be much more useful if the “Half” button would work, because many of the patterns I might use play twice too fast.
The documentation says
Half-Time On/Off
Activates half-time rhythmic feel for the playback of the main pattern. This is reached by extending the normal rhythm over two bars rather than by halving the tempo. If a style does not contain halftime patterns, this parameter is not available.
So I surmise the Simon Phillips patterns don’t include any half-time patterns. It is a shame. There is some good stuff here, but it all seems to half-baked. That’s a lot of money to spend for software that was not really finished, considering it has been out there for 5 years without any updates.
I’m trialling the Simon Phillips jazz pack at the moment, only one bossa nova program. In general much smaller than I thought it would be for £80 and I prefer the sound of the standard GA se kit!
I agree. What is there is good. But it is far from being a broad solution. That’s a lot of money to pay for something so thin. In my case, it actually fits what I need, so I will probably buy it, but it does seem out of line with other offerings.
I’ve noticed they just dropped the price on the SP jazz pack. Maybe they heard us moaning! I did just get a really cool demo track out of it so I picked it up. Fingers crossed for a classy Latin style expansion in the pipeline
Caution. SP Jazz Drims is a little confusing. The 30-day trial requires the old eLicenser system. The purchased version uses the new license system, but they don’t tell you that.
I bought it from them last week and it’s legit. They manually issue the license so I bought on Sunday and they emailed the code on Monday morning. I think it must be a clearance sale or something .
What country do you live in? I tried to order from the US. They say they are happy to sell to US. But using the credit card payment path, I could never get the system to accept my phone. I use 001 plue the normal 10 digits. I chatted with them online and they said to go through Paypal, but that gave me “Unfortunately, we do not ship to your selected country”
Thanks. I tried that, but now I see that, although I selected the United States when creating my account, the shopping cart has switched me to "UK Mainland and now only allows country selection of the 4 UK countries.
So despite the chat conversation that they deal globally, there apparently is no way to place an order.
