Let’s move over to the more electronic side of things (although there’s plenty of places where they cross over). Nerve is a powerful beat manipulator and pattern created with a diverse and interesting sample library. It was designed by what they call “veteran dance music producers” and that should give you a clue as to what this plugin is all about.
Nerve comes with a 2GB library of presets, drumkits, patterns, hits and loops from world-class Sound Designers crossing many genre boundaries. Or you can import your own samples just by dropping them onto any one of the 16 pads in a kit. You can slice and dice samples across those pads, set loop points, stretch, sculpt, resynthesize and do a lot of other sample processing.
Sequencing is easy and it occupies the top half of the interface. It combines nicely with modulation pages, velocity, filtering and other processes that you can apply to the track for the selected pad. You can extract grooves from other places like REX files to apply directly to your tracks. There are some great performance features where you can re-trigger pads on-the-fly, create fills and variations and enabled the Repeater function to keep things moving.
Each pad has a fat-sounding filter with flexible LFO modulation, multi-stage envelopes, gates, and an internal side-chain compressor to pump those kicks.
Nerve has been around a long time but it remains one of the most engaging beat-making and manipulating plugins around.
Street Price: $149
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