Unless your allergic to using a laptop, this is a much better buy than a hardware drum machine anywhere near this price. Overall:This is an amazingly flexible and powerful drum machine. Quantization can be turned on or off in real time.Hardware:The build quality is excellent. The Tone feature lets you play any tonal sound chromatically, like a 'keyboard' mode. Live performance:Velocity sensitive pads with aftertouch, on-the-fly sequence editing and recording, touch FX controls, sound parameters, mute/solo, and looping can all be done live.

The workflow is simple and frictionless and creating is fast and easy. Drag and drop your patterns as MIDI or audio right into your DAW, or track out the channels from Spark's mixer. Run it as a VST and it auto-syncs to your project tempo. Sequencing, sound design, sample manipulation, and mixing can all be accomplished in the unit's 'standalone' mode. Samples, synths, physical modeling, REX files, and importing your own samples are all supported.Production:You can get a ton of work done with Spark and the SparkLE before ever having to touch a DAW. Sounds:The sounds that come with this drum machine are stellar no less than you would expect from Arturia. There are both free and paid sound expansion packs available. Buy one.Support:This is an older Arturia product, but they've updated the software since it's release and are at version 2.4 at the time of this review. Awesome! Buy it!īottom line: This is a fantastic and powerful hybrid drum machine and it's crazy underpriced at $200.

We encountered a few little bugs, which were resolved with a quit & reopen of the Spark 2 software application, but this hybrid thing is so much fun to use! Comes with a ton of including and bonus expansions that all sound great, but if you have MPC waves/loops or any other sounds, you can import them into your Spark 2 projects to have an even more expansive sounds content bank. It’s also reportedly great for live shows, too. Really! We just needed something more portable (comes with a nice quality zippered sleeve, nice touch, Arturia!) and simple to use with good software to do some of our beats on. It is rock-solid with every knob, button, pad and every other part of the drum controller feels top-notch! We have a Maschine MK3, the Arturia SparkLE feels just as good (maybe even a bit better!) than the overall feel of that Maschine. I’d seen reviews that mentioned that the machine is well built, but that is sort of an understatement. But the SparkLE more than exceeding my expectations! The size, fit & finish of the hardware is quite simply Amazing. So, I knew going in that I should be fairly pleased with the hardware/software.

I did do a lot of research on this hybrid drum controller from Arturia, as this is an older product.

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