ILIO's Groove Control Products Now Shipping

February 21, 2000 -- ILIO Entertainments and Spectrasonics have delivered on the promise of Groove Control, a method of producing sampled groove libraries that allows the user control over the tempo, pattern, feel, time signature and mix of live stereo sampled grooves.

Groove Control activated libraries have already begun shipping. Spectrasonics has released Retro Funk and a Groove Control version of Liquid Grooves. ILIO is now shipping Skippy’s Big Bad Beats. Other libraries currently in production include a special Groove Control edition of Distorted Reality, plus the Brazilian and BackBeat drum libraries, from Spectrasonics. ILIO is near completion on Ethno-Techno by Bashiri Johnson. Both companies plan to release other Groove Control activated libraries in 2000 and are committed to creating more far into the future.

Groove Control Diagram
(Click for a larger picture)

Groove Control activated sample libraries let you manipulate live, stereo drum loops in ways never before possible. It doesn’t require any additional hardware or software to use, just your existing sampler and sequencer. To use one of the Groove Control activated libraries, you follow these three simple steps:

1. Find the groove you wish to use on the accompanying audio CD.
2. Load the Groove Control version of that loop into your sampler.
3. Load the corresponding sequence into your sequencer.

Once you’ve copied the Groove Control sequence into your own song sequence, the drum loop automatically locks to tempo. From there you can quantize, adjust the feel or pattern, change the time signature, adjust drum tunings, and more, all in an environment that’s already familiar to you. So there’s almost no learning curve.

The fun really begins when you layer several different loops at various tempos into one sequence. Without Groove Control, this would amount to a train wreck, but with Groove Control, all the loops march to the same drummer, lining up with the current song’s tempo. Start swapping drum sounds and sequences and you’ve risen to a whole new level, creating completely fresh grooves with very little effort.

ILIO and Spectrasonics consider Groove Control to be a major innovation for sample libraries. Never before has such flexibility been offered, especially with live, stereo sampled grooves. These unique capabilities combined with the excellent drum and percussion performances on the first Groove Control releases, should make a significant impact on users of drum loops.