Beat Thang Virtual 2.1.0 ($99.95) from Beat Kangz (beatkangz.com) builds on the MPC-style drum-machine concept with a variety of welcome enhancements. Like most MPC-style applications beat programming is done in real time, and you can erase individual sounds as well as record in Overdub or Replace modes. You also get a song sequencer for arranging patterns. AU and VST plug-in versions let you use Beat Thang Virtual (BTV) as a virtual instrument to harness the full power of your DAW for pattern programming, editing, and arranging. BTV is easy to learn, the manual is very readable, and you'll find 40 short videos online (learnbeatthang.com) to get you up and running.

BTV comes with a massive library of sounds organized in patterns (153), kits (105), instruments (201), and samples (3,234). The factory kits cover most popular styles: house, techno, funk, dance, pop, ethnic, and more. Multisampled instruments include bass, guitar, keys, winds and brass, synths, tuned percussion, sound effects, and a smattering of vocals. And you can fashion your own instruments and kits with as many as 16 layers, using the factory samples along with your own WAV files. (Audio formats other than WAV are not supported and the factory samples are encrypted, so they are not directly usable in other applications.)

Inside Thang
BTV's straightforward control panel and modest price belie the goodies under the hood. You see 13 pads in a piano-keyboard layout, but you actually get 97 pads arranged across eight banks and mapped to MIDI notes C-2 through C6 (MIDI note numbers 0 through 96). The unassuming pattern sequencer offers eight tracks for sequencing internal kits. Each track holds its own kit or instrument and has its own loop length. That makes it easy to create a short percussion loop and overlay a longer melody or chord pattern. An additional eight tracks let you create patterns for external MIDI devices.

FIG. 1: The buttons along the left edge of the editor section choose the level for editing (pattern-level shown here). The wedges at each end of the lower bar scroll through parameter pages.

The Song, Pattern, Kit, and Inst(rument) buttons select which element is displayed and edited in the main window at the top (see Fig. 1). Between that window and the pads at the bottom you'll find transport, track- and bank-select, and mode buttons. A few keyboard shortcuts (transport, edit, and undo, for example) help navigation, but this is one area where the current version comes up short—you wind up doing a lot of inconvenient mouse clicking.

BTV's file browser automatically navigates to the elements appropriate for the current editor mode. For example, when you first select Pattern the browser shows folders labeled Virtual Patterns and User Patterns from which you can load a BTV factory pattern or one you've created yourself. Click the Pattern editor's Edit button and the browser displays Virtual Kits and User Kits folders from which you can load a kit for the track you're editing. Items in the Virtual folders are always protected, so you can't mess up your BTV library unless you purposely do so in your computer's file browser. You can, however, save any edits to a factory element (song, pattern, kit, and so on) in the User folder. Other user-library file management, such as renaming, needs to be handled manually in your computer's file browser. Browsing is a bit inconvenient because the library structure does not use subfolders—searching through a few hundred kits, instruments, or patterns or a few thousand samples can get tedious.

Kits, Instruments, Samples, and Effects
On the kit and instrument levels (which have identical editors) you can create velocity zones for the layers, set group mutes (most useful for kit pieces), specify a key range (to create playable pitched instruments), and do some basic sample editing. Sample edits on the kit and instrument level, most of which are layer-specific, include volume, pan, pitch, trigger mode (gate, one-shot, and retrigger), lowpass filter cutoff and resonance, volume ADSR envelope, and sample start and end points.

Version 2.1.0 adds a rudimentary sample slicing utility called Autochop to the kit and instrument editors. It has sensitivity and frequency controls but no manual slice editing. It takes some tweaking, but you can usually find an acceptable slicing. Autochop spreads the slices across the pads starting at the bottom (see Fig. 2).

FIG. 2: With the Autochop editor you set the Sensitivity and Frequency controls to capture the desired slices then click the OK button to have them mapped across BTV's pads.

BTV has a separate sample editor that lets you edit any of the factory and user samples (see Fig. 3). You can trim, change the gain, reverse, pitch shift, and time stretch samples and then save the results as WAV files. That, incidentally, lets you export factory samples for use in other applications.

You get two send effects—delay and reverb—and an insert multi-effect called Freak that offers chorus/phase/flanging, distortion, filtering, and specialty effects like vinyl, vibrato, and pitch shift. Each track has post-volume delay and reverb sends, Freak level controls, and cutoff and resonance sliders for a multimode resonant filter. Individual kit pieces also have delay and reverb sends that precede the track sends, so you can control how much delay and reverb each kit piece receives relative to the track send amounts.

FIG. 3: BTV's sample editor, accessed with the Sample button, lets you perform basic edits such as trim, gain change, pitch shift, and time stretch to factory as well as user samples.

In Your DAW
BTV makes fast work of editing kits and creating patterns, and once you're comfortable with that, building a song couldn't be simpler. You click the Song and Edit buttons (CMD/CTRL+1 and CMD/CTRL+E) and start selecting patterns from the user and factory libraries. Each pattern in the song can be looped a specific number of times, and the song will follow any tempo changes embedded in its patterns. Nevertheless, the time will undoubtedly come when you want to expand on your BTV efforts in your DAW. BTV makes that easy, too.

Exporting BTV songs and patterns is the simplest approach. In either case, you can choose Live mode to capture your live performance as the song or pattern loops. If Live is off, the export ends after one pass. The exported material is saved as a WAV file in the user samples library for importing and editing in BTV as well as in other applications. When exporting patterns, you can mute and solo tracks, and BTV will export only what is heard.

The alternative to exporting audio is using BTV as an AU or VST plug-in in your DAW. BTV patterns and songs will follow your DAWs tempo and transport, but unfortunately, you cannot transfer pattern tracks as MIDI data. You can, however, access the kit or instrument on any BTV track using the MIDI channel of the same number. That gives you much greater editing flexibility than is available in BTV alone. If you happen to have a step-sequencing application or a step-sequencer plug-in in your DAW, that's a perfect match for BTV.

Beat It

BTV is still a young program with a few bugs to work out, but there's nothing that will keep you from making music. More keyboard shortcuts, MIDI learn, MIDI export, separate track outputs for the plug-ins, import of AIFF and BWF audio formats, and manual slice editing in Autochop would all be welcome additions.

Beat Kangz gives you a lot of bangz for your buck in Beat Thang Virtual. The sample library alone is worth the price. The assembled kits, instruments, and patterns are well crafted and provide a good starting point for building your own patterns. It's easy to interface most pad controllers with BTV, and that's the best setup for building beats on the fly. Whether you prefer to work in real time or to leisurely edit patterns, Beat Thang Virtual will be a worthy addition to your studio.

Pros: Quick to learn. Huge library of samples, kits, and patterns. Excellent feature set for a beat box. Great price.
Cons: Only imports WAV audio files. Limited keyboard shortcuts. No MIDI pattern export. No separate track outputs from plug-in versions.

Len Sasso is a freelance writer specializing in music technology. For an earful, visit his website, swiftkick.com.