XLN Audio - XO
Is this the best sample management tool our there?
Every producer nowadays has thousands or even millions of samples on their hard drives… Especially since sample downloading platforms became a thing, we all gather tons of one-shots and loops to use in our productions and if you are not a very organized person like me, you’ll end up searching for samples for hours in folders and sub-folders just to find a kick that fits your track.
To tackle that problem a few companies have developed plugins to help you manage and organize your samples. A great example would be ADSR Sample Manager where you can search within the plugin and find samples buried in your horrible folder system. This option provides you with a solution when you want to search for samples.
XLN Audio has also a sample management plugin called XO but this one is a lot different. XO is not just a sample management plugin. It is essentially a drum machine that uses your one-shot samples and can help you create amazing beats and patterns using its very deep but also fun-to-use interface.
XO is separated into two main areas. Space & Edit.
In the Space tab, you will see a swarm of little color-coded dots that represent the samples available. XO comes with over 8.000 (!) high-quality sounds to play with but you can of course load up your own samples and use them within the plugin. The colors represent different drum types like Kicks - Red, Snares - Blue, HiHats - Yellow, etc. so you can navigate easily and audition sounds. On the left column, you have your 8 tracks where you can add any of those samples and start creating your beat. There is no limitation on how you’ll use your tracks, you can just add anything you like from the samples available.
It also comes with lots of presets and you can also buy more presets on XLN’s Website if you are looking for some extra inspiration for programming drums!
You can always search for samples through the search option, but once you see that beautiful sea of samples, you’ll probably never use that. I find myself constantly clicking those little dots trying to find the sound that I like instead of searching for one.
In the Edit tab, you’ll see the samples you’ve selected and the Step Sequencer. Here you can, of course, sequence your sounds, but also manipulate them with Pitch & Tone Controls, Filters, 2 Send Effects that you can use on any sound, a Saturator for the Master output, Accent Control, Swing for each track, and more. On the Sequencer, you have two parts, A & B, that you can chain together to add some variation to your beat. It would be nice to have a couple more parts to create more variations, but even with those two, you can make some very interesting beats.
As you see, in XO you can not only sequence but at the same time edit your samples in a ton of ways so you can create the exact sequence and sound you want. So, XO actually is a very powerful software sampler that comes with almost every feature you would want on a sampler.
My favorite feature though is the random sample swapping that happens every time you click on the arrows next to the small circle on the bottom left corner of the plugin. With it, you can flick through different samples using the same sequence until you find the ideal set of sounds. Once you hear something you like, you can lock some parts and continue randomly swapping the other ones. This way you can audition so many samples, so fast, and have a lot of happy accidents!
Conclusion
XO is a great and very inspiring plugin for sure. It’s not just a plugin for sample management, and it will definitely change the way you program drums. Having a hardware sequencer myself, most of the time I prefer to use XO to sequence drums because I don’t need to load any samples, there is no limit on how many samples it can store, and it’s so immediate and fun! The randomization feature is also something extremely useful because you end up with unexpected results and if you are a power user, XO has a ton of options to edit your sequence (even for melodic parts).
I love instruments that are dead simple to use but at the same time can get as deep as you want, and XO is one of them. So if you have lots of samples you rarely use, XO will bring all of them to life in an exciting way and you’ll level up your drum game!
