Recording - April 2011 - 17

(sliders, knobs and buttons), so there is no reason to leave them off the machine! I started with the most basic of ideas: entering in a live beat a few pads at a time, then building up a song from these smaller parts. This included creating variations, accessing both sound and song building functions on the fly, and creating a full-fledged track as quickly as possible. This turned out to be fairly easy to do, since the library layout is so easy to access and the song-building functions were similar enough to an MPC’s for this veteran MPC user to have no issues. I also found myself inspired by the Groove system of BPM. This allows you to change the playback of your beat to match the grooves found on MPC or Linn drum machines (two of the most sought-after “feel” machines), or to change the groove to match a human drummer’s playing. In all cases, the selection was simple, and you have the ability to dial in the amount of timing and velocity alteration that you want on your track, giving you a significant amount of control without over-complicating the process. Unlike with many similar devices, the interaction between live pad programming and grid/step programming is very fluid. When you start laying down beats, the steps are displayed on a grid where you can easily edit or delete notes you just played. If you want to work in more detail, the individual pads can be managed in a

“graph” display that lets you alter almost any part of the individual hits, from length to filter cutoff modulation. So while it is easy to lay down tracks, you can also get as tweaky as you might like. Once I had come up with a basic beat, I put together a mix using just the tools within BPM itself. This is where MOTU’s long history of both host and plug-in creation comes into play: the effects and mixing system is easy to understand from a beat-box standpoint, but it is pro-quality in terms of results. The internal effects are wonderfully good, and include a convolution reverb that wowed me. Effects can be used as inserts devices on parts, banks or the master out, or treated as aux send effects for the entire mix or a single bank. The flexibility in effect routing greatly added to the tweakability of the system for making a beat just right. The mixer is easy to work with, and the results are very, very good. Combined with the quality of the sound library and the clean output of the BPM audio engine (or, on occasion, the grit of the SP-1200 using “SP” mode), the mixed beat sounded fantastic. All in all, I found the process of creating a complete track to be easy as pie with this system. As I expanded the scope of the tracks I was creating, I also dove into the “Rack” system. This is a set of alternative banks that allow you to use multi-sampled content rather than pad banks. You can still

trigger the sounds with the pads, but it is much more convenient to run them from a MIDI keyboard or using the piano-roll sequencer option in the display area. The available sounds range from synth pads to ethnic stringed instruments while still maintaining the modern flavor of the rest of the sound library. Racks are a great addition to BPM when building larger beats and backing tracks, since it opens the door to a whole new sample environment from within the device. This is also where BPM lets the beat-slice folks do their magic, with the ability to load any loop, slice it up automatically, and display each slice as a MIDI note on the grid, something the MPCs never did well and which works much better in software. In use as a plug-in As a plug-in, BPM works quite well (as you might imagine given MOTU’s plug-in expertise). There are two ways of sequencing work within the plug-in environment; which one you choose will depend on how you like to approach percussion programming. If you prefer putting percussion tracks into your sequencer’s tracks, you can use the MIDI notes to trigger the sounds just like with any other sound module. Luckily, the MIDI note is clearly displayed on the pad, so there is no confusion about which MIDI note will be needed to sound a pad.

http://www.lynxstudio.com http://www.lynxstudio.com

Recording - April 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2011