Time and volume envelopes can be edited with a great deal of precision, and can contain straight and curved segments. In use, Gross Beat is actually quite intuitive - certainly more so than the slightly bewildering help file might lead you to believe. If this is difficult to visualise, rest assured that it’s much easier to grasp when you can watch the playback marker move and hear the effect on the audio. In the screen grab, for example, the blocky orange envelope creates a stuttering ‘gate’ effect that gradually increases in speed, while the green wavy envelope spins an imaginary turntable (represented by the small ‘clock face’ in the upper left-hand corner) back through 180 degrees, in four smooth steps. These control time and amplitude modulation respectively, and work pretty much as you’d expect. Two different multi-point envelopes are superimposed: one (in green) is the ‘time mapping’ envelope, while the other (in orange) is the ‘volume mapping’ envelope. A vertical green line scrolls from left to right across the plug-in’s display (the ‘envelope mapping panel’) to indicate the host’s playback position relative to the buffer.
![gross beat vst free full gross beat vst free full](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/c2/b9/1cc2b940f76ccf629b12dca7ecc3a671.jpg)
The plug-in provides a two-bar-long audio buffer, which is continually refreshed as the host application plays. That said, Gross Beat is rather more sophisticated than its predecessors. This is not an entirely new idea, and one or two similar plug-ins have previously seen the light of day. More specifically, “gating, glitch, repeat, scratching and stutter” noises are the goal, the target audience being dance producers wishing to emulate the turntable trickery of the more creative club DJs.
![gross beat vst free full gross beat vst free full](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YWAZ9wFCook/maxresdefault.jpg)
Another offering from the people behind FL Studio, the not-very-descriptively named Gross Beat is an effects plug-in “designed for repetition and scratching effects”.