The USB provides all you need in terms of communication and power if you use Spark as closed system. This is 'old-skool' drum programming at its pared-down best, and is one area in which hardware control surfaces win over software, albeit for the simplest of reasons - it's just more fun.Īs far as interconnectivity goes the Spark controller has a USB port (the only thing you need to use in standard host mode), as well as MIDI In/Out, a PSU input and power switch.

At the top of the unit the 16 beat selection/programming buttons, transport and looping controls all do exactly what you want them to do, making programming and editing of individual pad patterns simple and effective. To the left of this sits a touch-sensitive FX pad and to the right, the pattern/song buttons and kit/instrument selection and load dial. The middle section however, consisting of six hardwired editing controls (for volume, pan filtering and Aux FX levels), is better thought out, and therefore more immediately usable. None of this is helped by the slow refresh rate of the backlit - text only - LCD screen. The three unlabelled infinite encoder controls above each pad can be assigned to various sound-editing parameters, but you will need to look at your computer screen to see what each knob controls.Īgain, we can't help but feel the competition do this better, even if some flexibility is compromised at the expense of clarity. The horizontal layout is not perhaps as flexible as the MPC or Native Instruments Maschine's grid-style, and with only eight pads you need to move between the two pad-banks quite often when working on grooves. The pads have a springiness to them, not unlike an Akai MPC, and are a broadly similar size. Light my fireĪs far as the hardware goes what you have is pleasant-looking metal-fronted unit populated with drum pads at the bottom. There are also a number of areas of functionality that are not covered by the hardware controller, and we'll take a look at these later.

Using the great-sounding '80's Studio Drums' kit we bashed and tweaked our way through real-time recording, step-time programming, kit, drum and pattern selection, as well as a healthy dose of individual drum parameter editing.Įverything fell into place quite easily without ever looking at the host computer screen, although when it came to engaging the metronome or arranging patterns in song mode (which didn't appear to work as detailed in the manual) things got a little trickier. Given that the point of hardware controllers is to free you from the perceived shackles of screen and mouse editing, we decided to dive headlong into some beat-making using just the unit that was sitting in front of us.

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