User Interface How does it look? Is it easy to use? Can it be confusing?
First impressions on opening up Guru's UI is that your greeted with a very professional looking and well laid out interface.The default skin you get on opening Guru is a nice silvery grey *my prefered skin* although there's an option to change this to black. There's nothing at all confusing about Guru's UI as everything is well labelled and most functions if not all are accessed through a single mouse click to take you to the vast amount of features avalable. About ease of use..It took me about 4 hours to get the general feel of Guru but mostly i found myself messing around with the remix slider to alter patterns i had created but so far iv'e only scratched the surface of this fine instrument.
Sound What does it sound like?
The sound can be as crisp or as dirty as you like by adding filter and fx such as bit crush and ring mod and assigning them to various pads.Recording patterns and creating scenes is a breeze and recorded loops etc are output in 24bit quality...Top Notch indeed.
Features Is it a one trick pony or does it offer more than you would expect?
Im running the full version here so the features included are vast and im still finding new ones..One things for sure and that is that Guru is no one trick pony and does offer very much more than i expected espescially when you start dabbling with the subouts and Guru's sound shaping ability. You can save songs,patterns,all pads as kits and more. The scenes are absolutly brilliant for live playing just hold down shift and click your mouse when the current pattern is playing and it copy's that current pattern to a scene of which there are many..Again a must for live use so thumbs up to Fxpansion for that feature from me.
Documentation Does it have a manual? Is it any good? Online tutorials? etc
There is a well written pdf manual although i haven't really had a read of it yet.
Presets Does it come with presets? How many? Any good?
I can't comment on the presets as i delete all presets of any synth i buy or download so as to start with a blank canvas for sound programming purposes although after registering Guru at Fxpansion there are tons of sounds/loops and kits available for different genres for you to download.
Customer Support If you have never had to use Customer Support this will be hard to judge, but please try to be fair, do they offer a forum, e-mail support, an online FAQ, etc.
Iv'e never actually used customer support but if i need to know anything i'll just email Angus or one of the guys at FX and their on it as most will know the guys are active daily here at KVR so it's 10/10 from me for that reason.
Value For Money Considering how much it cost you was it worth it?
Well iv'e seen that Fxpansion have released a CM version with a special upgrade price so if i were any user i'd say upgrade to the full version for sure..The full version has so many features and it could be the only source you'll need for drums period. I paid about £105 for Guru and i'd have paid double so at the end of the day yes it was worth it :-)
Stability Does it crash? Is it unpredictable in how it sounds?
Guru has only ever crashed in Standalone mode for me but im sure that had more to do with my system setting or user error than anything else..Iv'e never got it to crash in Live/Sonar or Studio One Pro yet.
On a final note:
This is my goto instrument for Drums.My only gripe if it is a gripe is that i'd like a slightly larger UI and to be able to name the pads but other than that i would highly recommend buying this software and if there is a Guru 2 anytime in the future then things can only get better...Im hooked on Guru it's as simple as that..
