NOT JUST FOR DJS ANY MORE

Music and motion have always had a very close relationship, whether you’re talking classical ballet, ’50s/’60s “dance craze” rock (like the Twist, the Swim, and the Hully-Gully), the Sufi trance masters of Joujouka, or for that matter, the trance masters of today’s club scene in Berlin. And what gets your body up and moving is beats— whether it’s the pounding of drums, the steps of an arpeggiator, or even a rhythmic wah-wah applied to a bass line.

The four products in this issue’s roundup are all about beats, but each adds a novel twist to the subject. Roger Linn’s AdrenaLinn Sync translates his hardware Adrenalinn into a virtual world, Drumagog 5 goes beyond drum replacement to drum enhancement, while iZotope’s Stutter Edit is a truly novel processor . . . or maybe it’s an instrument . . . or both . . . whatever . . . you’ll have to decide for yourself. And SONiVOX’s Pulse, while not a radical re-thinking of the MPC concept, nonetheless brings along several interesting new twists—one of which is a very attractive price.

What’s more, all of these made their “official trade show debut” at the 2011 Winter NAMM show (actually, AdrenaLinn Sync came out over the summer but didn’t make it to the 2010 Summer NAMM show). Unfortunately, we ran out of room before we could review some other hot new products, like FXpansion’s Geist (the “spiritual successor” to their Guru software), the latest MIDI and audio expansion packs for Toontrack’s superb Superior Drummer 2, and M-Audio’s Venom—yes, it’s a keyboard, albeit one that includes an audio interface and has a heavy beats/electronica orientation. We’ll be covering these in the not-too-distant future, but meanwhile, you can get more information on them in our NAMM show report.

Ready to get off your butt and move? If these kinds of musical tools won’t do it, you’d better check your pulse just to make sure you’re still alive.