Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5 Stars
Swedish music software company Klevgrand have expanded on their range of drum and percussion instruments with OneShot, a drum sampler designed for single‑strike samples. Described as a “percussive workstation”, OneShot comes with a large collection of acoustic and electronic sounds in over 200 presets to get you started. Notably, it also provides the ability to easily drag and drop your own samples into the player and redesign them to build a custom kit.
Everything you need to know about OneShot is clearly presented in the intuitive and well‑organised main UI. There are 15 instrument slots per kit, each with its own mixer channel and controls for volume, pan, pitch, effects inserts and sends. Auditioning and replacing samples is hassle‑free: just use the drop‑down menu in each slot, and either load a new sample altogether or edit the existing ones by adjusting start and end points, or choosing whether the round robins play in sequential or random order, for example. One of OneShot’s many strengths is that the samples are high quality, thus providing a good foundation for further manipulation and processing.
You have multiple opportunities to add effects at various stops along the way, starting from the individual instrument slots to two parallel busses, as well as on the Master Output channel. OneShot also supports multi‑out routing, which makes isolating and further tweaking sounds in your DAW very convenient.
At the bottom of the main UI is a handy visual guide that represents the Triggers, mapped to MIDI notes, that trigger the slots. Additionally, each slot can be controlled by more than one Trigger. This becomes fun when you realise that each Trigger is highly customisable: set up individual velocity curves; adjust frequency, pitch and other settings, and you can create separate, custom triggers for the same slot before programming your beat. For instance, tweaking the pitch envelope on a simple vintage bass drum transforms the sample to something resembling a tabla! Once you start composing, you can have variations ready to play into your sequencer. This also lends itself well to live performance — samples (and variations) can be pre‑assigned to Triggers and because it’s live, you’re creating a one‑of‑a‑kind new version, on the fly. When it comes to loading your own samples, you don’t even have to limit yourself to percussive sounds with short decays in the spirit of the drum sample‑ness of OneShot; a four‑note synth arpeggio sample fed through OneShot’s effects chain worked beautifully as part of a larger groove.
The real fun with Klevgrand’s OneShot seems to be in creatively fashioning your own kits and breaking the rules.
While the quest for realism from programmed drums is always ongoing — and OneShot offers many tools to create drum patterns with that human feel — the real fun with Klevgrand’s OneShot seems to be in creatively fashioning your own kits and breaking the rules, assisted by an intuitive GUI for a seamless workflow.
$149
$149