Studio One: Impact XT

From the Note, Drum or Pattern editor, clicking on the little pads icon will open up a streamlined Impact XT GUI, in which you can access most of Impact’s functions.

Impact XT is now right at home in Studio One's MIDI editor.

With Studio One v7, PreSonus decided to pull the interface of their Impact drum machine into the Piano Roll/Drum/Note editor window. No more having to deal with floating windows when making beats or fiddling with samples. I wonder if this concept will spread to other instruments, because it is indeed very tidy. With the 7.1 update, PreSonus have doubled down on the Impact integration and put a few more bits and pieces within reach without having to load the full GUI.

Just to recap, Impact XT is an MPC‑style pad‑based sample player designed for drum kits and percussive elements. It has eight banks of 16 pads that you can fill with samples, all within a single patch. These can be single one‑shot hits, loops or instrument sounds, and you have shaping controls over the pitch, filtering and amplitude of each pad. The sample display window gives you a certain amount of editing in terms of start and end points, normalisation and reversing. There’s lots you can do with layering, round robins, parameters and output routing, and there is plenty of depth to explore, but for this workshop, we’re going to keep things relatively simple and focus on the new integration.

Brace For Impact

The magic button to absorb Impact into the Note editor is the button to the far right of the toolbar that looks like two rows of four drum pads. It’s visible whether you are in the Piano Roll editor, Drum editor or Pattern editor. (The score view, it seems, is not interested.) Impact appears as if squashed over to the right of the editor, but you can resize it by dragging the dividing bar. In fact, the layout is very adaptable, and dynamically scales and rearranges itself to suit your view. If you make it really small, you’ll eventually lose the pads entirely and be left with just the sample display and parameters. A pair of buttons in the top right corner lets you swap between sample view and pad view. You have no real control over what the layout does, so you just have to resize the editor until you get what you need.

With the integrated Impact GUI open, you can drag and drop samples directly onto the pads, or onto any of the notes in the Note editor.

The design of the front end is slightly different to the main GUI, but you will find almost all of the features and controls if you dig around. The main details panel, usually to the right of the sample display, is now in a rather untidily arranged space directly underneath. All the options are there for setting the sample type, quantise, tempo settings, choke and offsets; they’re just not as neatly presented. You can edit the sample in the same way, apply normalisation, reverse, set the start and end points (although there’s no Start/End value display) and add a crossfade to loops. The pitch, filter and amp controls are all present, although the envelope settings are hidden behind a button.

The only really noticeable omissions are the mute and solo buttons...