REVIEW

MOTU BPM playback alongside your DAW tracks. Th en, if you’re fi nding REX fi les or Apple loops are more your cup of tea, both fi le NEED TO KNOW BEAT PRODUCTION MACHINE types can be easily dragged and dropped into pad banks. As far as amalgamating all Price Mark Of The Unicorn adds yet another instrument to its “ As for editing sounds, BPM allows you to take a machete to $549 the best features of the MPC waveforms with your typical editing tools such as normalise, Contact burgeoning stable of exemplary software instruments. style ‘rhythm computer’ into a Major Music fade in/out, crop, silence, and reverse. Waveforms can also be 1300 306 670 Text: Brad Watts piece of soft ware, MOTU rendered as one-shot samples or looped as necessary. A single [email protected] has prett y much pad can also have a maximum of 256 stereo samples assigned www.majormusic.com.au to it, each stereo (or mono) sample being assigned to a separate Pros nailed it with BPM layer. Layers can be adjusted for panning, volume, and velocity Faithful reproduction of MPC Where on earth did the term ‘urban music’ come from? sampling and sequencing platform – all shoehorned into both a functionality. Aft er a modicum of research I’ve learned it was coined standalone application and soft ware plug-in. MAS, RTAS, VST, range. Th at’s some pretty powerful sample triggering. Once Open to user samples. back in 1974 by an infl uential radio program director by the and AU formats are all supported and the soft ware is compatible your trigger pad or rack bank is set up, the resulting sound Cheap 'as’. name of Frankie Crocker. Frankie (now deceased) was working with OSX 10.4 and Windows XP or Vista (32- or 64-bit). Th e can undergo further sculpting via amplitude, fi lter and pitch Runs on lower spec computers. at WBLS Radio in New York City at the time and presented system requirements of BPM aren’t astronomical either – a individual samples in the library,” and about 1000 drum loops. envelopes, a selection of 12 styles of fi lter (with resonance), then Cons routed to eff ects via three auxiliary sends. Th ese eff ects cover Lack of dedicated LFO may annoy what was, back then, a unique mixture of R&B, disco, and 1GHz G4 or a Pentium 4 1GHz (or AMD equivalent) machine Th ese are all unreleased sounds, exclusive to BPM. some. gospel music. Th anks to his infl uential radio slot, ‘Urban is more than capable of running the program. All you’ll need pretty much every gamut of time and dynamics augmentation, BPM will also load library elements from other MOTU sample- Summary Contemporary’ became a radio format that playlist designers is about 15GB of drive space to store the BPM sample data and along with distortion algorithms and a global master eff ect based systems such as MachFive 2 and Electric Keys, or you MOTU has quite a stable of could associate with a particular musical style and broadcast to you’re away. Th is library is provided on two dual-layer DVDs section. Heck, there are even convolution reverb settings in extremely capable instrument can sample your own waveforms, so there’s plenty of scope for an established and receptive demographic. that you simply copy to the correct directory when installing the there. Th e only thing I found lacking in BPM as far as sound plug-ins – BPM keeps up the expanding BPM’s sonic horizons. Th at said, BPM also includes standards already att ained by soft ware. BPM also uses an iLok for authorisation, and MOTU design tools were concerned was a dedicated LFO, but During the 1980s, this genre expanded and began to include a section of ‘rack’ synthesiser-style playback units for stacking of instruments such as MachFive in its benevolent wisdom supplies an iLok USB key with the then again, considering BPM’s percussion focus, this isn’t and MX4. Worth it for the sounds hip-hop and rap music, due mainly to the African-American synth-style sounds and playback over the entire 128 MIDI-note package, which is rare for a soft ware provider. Of course, if you really an omission. alone. origins of these musical styles. Nowadays the term ‘urban’ is range. Th ese two sets of ‘racks’ are in addition to the four banks already own an iLok you can simply transfer the BPM license to used to encompass a swag of musical evolutions that various of 16 pads, normally used for triggering single shot samples. MUSIC NON-STOP your main key and keep the supplied one as a spare, or use the electronic instruments have grown up alongside. Foremost When sequencing events, the virtual (on-screen) trigger pad As far as amalgamating all the best features of the MPC-style supplied key. Either way, it’s great that MOTU supplies a key as among these instruments is the Roland TR-808 banks are sequenced using the familiar step-sequencing style ‘rhythm computer’ into a piece of soft ware, MOTU has pretty part of its BPM package. – with its kick drum designed specifi cally to sound huge in car grid, and the ‘rack’ style banks are sequenced using a pianola- much nailed it with BPM – there’s nary an MPC feature missing stereos. But perhaps more notable are the Roger Linn drum BANG IT OUT roll style grid. All perfectly predictable, and extremely easy to from this soft ware, and then there’s features galore added for machines, and the later MPC samplers from Akai, co-designed Getting back to the actual BPM sample library, the collection drive without once sticking your nose anywhere near a manual. good measure. Th e obvious rival contender for your money in by Roger Linn himself. Th ese boxes are the ultimate percussion is entirely 24-bit/96k, with all down-sampling to suit your Quantising features include the ubiquitous MPC swing-style this particular virtual instrument arena is Native Instruments’ units used in the genre, gaining cult – as well as collectible – current DAW project’s sample rate taken care of by the program. groove adjustment, along with feels from live drummers and Maschine, but if you’re doing the majority of your work within status with each passing day. Speaking of which, the program even has an ‘SP mode’ – which the Linn drum machine. Once you’re happy with your patterns, a DAW and not performing live that oft en, BPM could be the bumps BPM into a down-sampled emulation of the E-mu they can be sequenced into songs, with the option to assign the ideal (and signifi cantly cheaper) way forward. Th e sounds are BANG IT IN SP1200, adding the appropriate grit for mimicking the iconic patterns to the pad banks for real-time triggering. Of course, great, the programmability is excellent, and the unit dovetails So what has all this got to do with MOTU’s BPM? Well, sounds of this seminal drum machine. Th ere are over 10,000 these patterns or songs will sync to the host DAW for seamless with every DAW platform available – Mac and Windows. eff ectively, BPM is a soft ware incarnation of the MPC-style

It's a familiar scene: the MPC- inspired interface has won literally thousands of friends over the years. Here it is on your DAW.

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