When I put Gross Beat on, it was… it was hard. I just automated the thing-you know, automated it to just chop and stop and go and have a rhythm to it. “Gross Beat is a cool tool, man,” Pluss tells us. We asked him about how he deployed Gross Beat on the riser from Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.”: Some even use it on effects, like Pluss of Ear Drummers. There are plenty of examples where it’s used on the master bus, but it’s also commonly thrown on synth leads and pads to add intrigue to otherwise stagnant chords. The beauty of the effect plugin lies in how it can be used in so many different ways. The sound is so ubiquitous that it’s almost difficult to find a trap song that doesn’t involve the plugin.

And even today, Image-Line includes a demo version of Gross Beat in their DAW for anyone who downloads it (with the full version being available for purchase at $69.00).įL Studio and Gross Beat have become synonymous with the sound of Atlanta trap music, whether it’s creating a gate effect, slowing down a sample (as heard on TM88’s beat for Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3”), or as a tape stop. The current iteration of the DAW-FL Studio 20-is well-suited for experienced producers as well it’s a full-fledged workstation with serious horsepower, and tons of award-winning producers who got their start on the DAW continue to swear by it decades later. However, that’s not to say that FL Studio is solely for beginners.

This led to a very large population of hip hop and trap producers first getting their start in FL Studio, and by extension, encountering Gross Beat and incorporating it into their workflow. That said, since FL Studio has always been a reasonably priced DAW, and since Windows devices have tended to be less expensive than their Apple counterparts, the DAW’s barrier to entry was often much lower for a budding producer without a significant budget. Unlike most other plugins that rival its level of popularity, Gross Beat was historically only supported for Windows systems, due to the same limitations of its parent DAW (although this has changed in recent years). In this article, we explore the unique history of the plugin, its cultural impact, how to use it in your music, and more. Similar to Sugar Bytes’ Effectrix or KORG’s KAOSSILATOR, Gross Beat is an incredibly powerful tool that can quickly apply rhythmic pitch-shifting and gating patterns to a channel’s output. Gross Beat is an extremely popular time- and pitch-shifting effect manufactured by Image-Line and distributed alongside FL Studio since version 9.

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