Grex

Your Whole Band. Every Genre. One Chord Away.

A player with a song, and a full band behind him without hiring one. For decades that dream lived in big, heavy, expensive boxes, closed and alone at the end of a cable. First came boxes that only kept time: a preset rhythm, a switch, nothing that listened to the player. Then something better, a whole band packed inside. Play a chord with your left hand and an arrangement answers it: bass, drums, guitars, strings, a horn line. Press a button and the song moves to its chorus. The Yamaha Tyros and the Korg Pa grew deeper and cleverer, and stayed exactly what they had always been: a box on a stand. Everything else moved into the computer: every instrument, every effect, a whole studio. The band never left the box.

Callisto, in 2018, was our first attempt: it played arrangements, but asked you to write them yourself. Betelgeuse followed in 2024 with real styles, though it still borrowed its sounds from elsewhere. Grex Ballada, our free ballad edition, was the first to bring the whole band inside, needing nothing but itself.

Grex is its big brother: the full professional arranger. 737 styles across twelve genres, from ballads and dance floors to Latin, jazz and the whole Orient, on a sound library built for them.

What it is

A complete arranger that runs inside your DAW. 737 pre-programmed styles, a full band, and your own sounds under your right hand. Every style carries its own set: the sounds on all sixteen channels, the mixer, the section routing, the levels, the effects. Load a style and it is finished.

Everything in Grex Ballada, and then

• 737 styles in twelve genres, instead of ninety ballads

• Three sound libraries: GM, World and Oriental

• EDM Kit: live synthesized drums for the dance styles, with a full pad editor

• Sound Engine: a built-in synthesizer behind the synth basses

• A complete drum kit editor, down to every drum family, with a ten-band EQ where each slider owns its own octave

• Funkey Mix: how much Funkey each style gets, saved with the style

• A full compressor in the Finisher

• The Orient at full depth: 164 oriental styles, an Oriental sound library and quarter-tone scales

The styles

• 737 styles: Ballad 54, Ballroom 28, Country 33, Dance 62, Entertainer 46, Latin 38, Movie & Show 42, Oriental 164, Pop & Rock 60, R&B 49, Swing & Jazz 47, World 114

• Every style loads finished, with its own sounds, mixer, jumps and levels, one click from a browser of thirty per page

• Search in its own window, with saved keywords and a results list. Favourites marked with a star

• Each style keeps its own tempo and time signature, and plays in 3/4, 6/8, 7/8, 9/8 and 10/8 as naturally as in 4/4

East and West

• 164 oriental styles: Arabic, Gulf, Maghrebi, Turkish, Persian, Azeri and Greek rhythms, each in its own meter

• An Oriental sound library alongside GM and World

• Oriental Scale: quarter-tone tuning per pitch class, half-flat and half-sharp, set from a one-octave keyboard

• 114 World styles: polkas and waltzes, Celtic jigs and reels, flamenco, norteño and banda, Cajun, zydeco and more

The band gets out of your way

A built-in ducker on the band, the feature the veteran hardware boxes never had. Two frequency points listen to your right hand and duck the band alone, before the two are mixed. Play a low melody and the band's low mids open under it while its brightness stays. Play nothing and the band is untouched. Most plugins put a compressor across the whole mix and pump everything at once; this opens a window exactly where your line lives.

Playing: the part that matters most

• Split keyboard: chords on the left, your own sounds on the right, with the split point wherever your hands want it

• 1 Finger for quick major and minor shapes; Fingered for real voicings, including maj7, m7b5, 9ths and 13ths

• Arranger / Piano turns the split off for an intro or a solo passage. Hold freezes the arrangement where it is, even mid-fill

• Global semitone moves a song into a singer's key without relearning it

• Single or Multi solo mode, for layering as many of your six solo voices as you want

• Harmony: duet, trio, block, octave or fifth, built from the chord the band is playing

• Multi Split: three zones, with bass, chords, and your solos on top

• Bass Inversion: the style keeps its own bass line and follows your lowest note, so nothing ever drops out

• Manual Bass: take the bass line yourself

The arrangement

• Sixteen section pads: four intros, four variations, four fills, a break and three endings. Press a variation and the fill that leads into it plays, landing on the beat

• Transitions quantise at 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 of a bar. A feel setting, not a right answer

• Fill length: a whole bar, or just its second half for a shorter lift

• Eight style elements: drums, percussion, bass, two chord parts, pad and two leads, muted and unmuted live

• Jumps: a table deciding where every intro, fill and break lands

• Crash: on every section change, automatically every N cycles, or by hand, with its own velocity, level and choice of cymbals

• Energy: how hard the band plays, not how loud

Tempo and transport

• Tempo knob, Tap, and Reset to the style's own written tempo

• Free, or synced to your DAW

• x1 / x2 / x1/2: half and double time with the groove intact

• Sync Play: the band waits, and your first chord starts it

• On Press: the band plays only while a chord is held

• Restart, and DAW Start to follow your host's transport

• Tempo saves with the song as an offset from the style's own, so the style stays the authority on its speed

Sounds

• Sixteen channels: eight for the band, eight for your right hand

• Three sound libraries. GM is built in; World and Oriental install by dropping in a folder and uninstall by deleting it

• A column selector for every slot, with sampled kits, composed kits and the EDM Kit

• Ignore Program Change per slot, when you want your choice to survive a style load

• A five-tab editor: Sound Engine, Synthesis, Modulation, Effect Sends, Inserts

• Envelopes, filter and LFOs per instrument

• Attack Glide on solo voices: a pitch scoop into the note, every time, every Nth note, or at random, with depth, time and shape

• Allowed Notes: keep a part inside the range it was actually sampled for

• Sound Engine: Synth Bass 1 and 2 play from a built-in synthesizer instead of samples, with two oscillators, FM, ring, sub and noise, drive, and a filter with its own envelope

• Funkey Mode: one press gives the band's chromatic percussion, organs, guitars, synth leads, ethnic and percussive voices their own wah and phaser. Make a style funky in one click

• Funkey Mix: set how much Funkey each style gets, saved with the style

Drums

• Sampled and composed kits for acoustic drums, and the EDM Kit for electronic ones

• A page per drum family: Under GM, Lower GM, Soft Kick, Low Kick, Kick, Stick, Snare, Clap, Cymbals, Toms and Rest GM, including the low percussion keys arranger styles rely on

• Per family: gain, pitch, length, a two-handle filter, round robin, a velocity curve, and Replace to swap in another set of samples

• Kick Mix: lay an electronic or an acoustic kick under the kit's own

• A ten-band kit EQ where every slider owns its own octave. Silence at the bottom, untouched in the middle, up to +24 dB at the top, with zero latency

• Saturation, compression, the Sweetener, pan and sends on every kit, and right-click audition of every drum

• EDM Kit: synthesized live and picked automatically for the dance styles. A pad grid in family colours, eight macros per pad, choke groups and an effects rack per family. Every edit saves with the set

Effects

• Chorus, reverb and delay as shared sends: one rack for the band and one for your right hand, so the two sit in different spaces. Early reflections on the reverb set the room size before the tail arrives

• Wah, phaser and the Sweetener as per-instrument inserts, where a shaper belongs

• Five-band EQ and pan on every instrument

• The Sweetener, named for jobs rather than engineer's numbers: Soften, Peak, Tame, Round

Mixing

• Eight style channels, eight solo channels, a bus for each hand, and a master

• One honest rule: the style states its level, your fader multiplies it afterwards. At the detent you hear exactly what the composer wrote

• Base unity in dB per bus, for when the fader is in the right place musically but the wrong place for loudness

• Slot trim, plus or minus 40 dB, for a part that arrives far too loud or far too quiet

• The band's balance saves with the song; the balance between your two hands stays with you

The Finisher

• A deliberately small master chain: Push into a ceiling limiter, a full compressor with threshold, ratio, attack and release, and an output trim

• Zero latency: no lookahead, no oversampling. Built for playing live, not for a mastering session

• Nothing that overrides your mix: no auto level, no stereo width, no tone shaping on somebody else's balance

• A/B bypass, factory reset, and a gain-reduction meter

• The Style Ducker: two frequency points, each with its own width, threshold, ratio, attack and release, keyed from your right hand and applied to the band before the two are mixed. A live curve shows what is being asked and what is actually happening

• Style Boost: one level for the whole band, set once for your rig

Control

• MIDI notes 0 to 35 reserved as remote controls: style elements, solo channels, all sixteen section pads and the transport, from a second keyboard or a pad controller

• MIDI learn by dragging, not typing. Move a control, it appears as a chip, drop the chip on anything on screen

• Push, toggle or knob behaviour per assignment, saved to named map files

• Pitch bend range and low velocity response for your own playing

Sets and songs

• A set holds everything about how a style sounds in your hands: sounds, mixer, jumps, energy, tempo offset, the ducker, Funkey and its mix

• Load, Save and Fast Save, plus a free-text note saved inside the set

• Your split point, Style Boost and the balance between your hands belong to your rig, not to a song, and follow you everywhere

• Song recorder: captures a whole performance, including the fills and section changes a DAW cannot see from outside

• Full DAW project recall: reopen a session and everything is where you left it

• A fourteen-chapter manual built into the plugin, on its own tab

• VST3, AU and CLAP, for Windows and macOS