Beat Scholar

Beat Scholar completely changed my experience working with drums in my music. Building out drums has admittingly always been a difficult part of my music-making process. In the past, I found making original drums to be extremely difficult with other VSTs. But with Beat Scholar, I've been able to make drum patterns I never thought I could.


The main thing I love is the UI. It's hard to express how much I love working with it. Even if you have no experience working with drum VSTs or know much about music theory, the UI makes creating oriental drum patterns a breeze. It's all just circles with colors that represent different sounds. Also, being able to have full control of each drum sound (pitch, damp, drive, distortion, etc) helps me make my drum beats sound unique to make my specific style of music.

After watching Beat Scholar's refreshing take on step sequencing on youtube, I picked this up on a holiday sale for $49. There are some other pros/cons that differentiate it from other beat makers to qualify my 3-star rating. For context; I can find my way around most step sequencers in DAWs and VSTs, and sharpened my teeth on Scream Tracker in the mid-90s.

+ intuitive beat/pattern visualization.

+ flexible randomization tools.

+ each bar can have it's own measure.

+ lots of keyboard shortcuts.

+ factory preset patterns are useful for learning what's possible (but not much else).

+ developer seems responsive to community feedback.

- UI feels a bit clunky: Needs tooltips, larger clickable areas on buttons, and better control affordances on hover, press, etc.

- Aside from note and velocity, I don't think any other parameters can be modulated/automated (humanizing, sample pitch, panning, reverse, etc.).

- Most factory preset kits/samples are not inspiring (YMMV) and the sampler is.. minimalistic. For that reason you'll almost certainly be routing the pads to another VST via MIDI.

- Remapping MIDI keys for each drum pad is difficult (improvements to this are planned).

- Regular price is high for it's current capabilities (buy on sale).

Overall: I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to sketch out intricate beats, but many will still reach for their favourite step-sequencer/DAW to polish and fine-tune the exported MIDI.

This is so refreshing and inovative take on drum sampler/sequecer.
With this plugin you can create some very cool and origianl drum patterns or spice up boring phrases.
Here is a video reviewing the features and demo of some presets.

https://youtu.be/6QOC-h_R5Sg

More reviews and tutorials

Beat Scholar is unique and also very well designed.

The recent addition of random tools, not just a random button but you can control the randomisation.

You can also "paint" rhythm pizzas! And there is presets for various random styles...

For me also very important very good multitouch screen support,

And it is also a nice live jam instrument...

Great drum machine, really easy way to make interesting beats and work with different measures.. definitely a must have for people that want to explore beyond the standard step sequencer paradigm.