Review: MOTU BPM Beat Production Machine
Mark Of The Unicorn adds yet another instrument to its burgeoning stable of exemplary software instruments.
By Brad Watts
2 February 2010
Where on earth did the term ‘urban music’ come from? After a modicum of research I’ve learned it was coined back in 1974 by an influential radio program director by the name of Frankie Crocker. Frankie (now deceased) was working at WBLS Radio in New York City at the time and presented what was, back then, a unique mixture of R&B, disco, and gospel music. Thanks to his influential radio slot, ‘Urban Contemporary’ became a radio format that playlist designers could associate with a particular musical style and broadcast to an established and receptive demographic.
During the 1980s, this genre expanded and began to include hip-hop and rap music, due mainly to the African-American origins of these musical styles. Nowadays the term ‘urban’ is used to encompass a swag of musical evolutions that various electronic instruments have grown up alongside. Foremost among these instruments is the Roland TR-808 drum machine – with its kick drum designed specifically to sound huge in car stereos. But perhaps more notable are the Roger Linn drum machines, and the later MPC samplers from Akai, co-designed by Roger Linn himself. These boxes are the ultimate percussion units used in the genre, gaining cult – as well as collectible – status with each passing day.
BANG IT IN
So what has all this got to do with MOTU’s BPM? Well, effectively, BPM is a software incarnation of the MPC-style sampling and sequencing platform – all shoehorned into both a standalone application and software plug-in. MAS, RTAS, VST, and AU formats are all supported and the software is compatible with OSX 10.4 and Windows XP or Vista (32- or 64-bit). The system requirements of BPM aren’t astronomical either – a 1GHz G4 or a Pentium 4 1GHz (or AMD equivalent) machine is more than capable of running the program. All you’ll need is about 15GB of drive space to store the BPM sample data and you’re away. This library is provided on two dual-layer DVDs that you simply copy to the correct directory when installing the software. BPM also uses an iLok for authorisation, and MOTU in its benevolent wisdom supplies an iLok USB key with the package, which is rare for a software provider. Of course, if you already own an iLok you can simply transfer the BPM license to your main key and keep the supplied one as a spare, or use the supplied key. Either way, it’s great that MOTU supplies a key as part of its BPM package.
BANG IT OUT
Getting back to the actual BPM sample library, the collection is entirely 24-bit/96k, with all down-sampling to suit your current DAW project’s sample rate taken care of by the program. Speaking of which, the program even has an ‘SP mode’ – which bumps BPM into a down-sampled emulation of the E-mu SP1200, adding the appropriate grit for mimicking the iconic sounds of this seminal drum machine. There are over 10,000 individual samples in the library, and about 1000 drum loops. These are all unreleased sounds, exclusive to BPM.
NEED TO KNOW
BPM will also load library elements from other MOTU sample-based systems such as MachFive 2 and Electric Keys, or you can sample your own waveforms, so there’s plenty of scope for expanding BPM’s sonic horizons. That said, BPM also includes a section of ‘rack’ synthesiser-style playback units for stacking of synth-style sounds and playback over the entire 128 MIDI-note range. These two sets of ‘racks’ are in addition to the four banks of 16 pads, normally used for triggering single shot samples. When sequencing events, the virtual (on-screen) trigger pad banks are sequenced using the familiar step-sequencing style grid, and the ‘rack’ style banks are sequenced using a pianola-roll style grid. All perfectly predictable, and extremely easy to drive without once sticking your nose anywhere near a manual. Quantising features include the ubiquitous MPC swing-style groove adjustment, along with feels from live drummers and the Linn drum machine. Once you’re happy with your patterns, they can be sequenced into songs, with the option to assign the patterns to the pad banks for real-time triggering. Of course, these patterns or songs will sync to the host DAW for seamless playback alongside your DAW tracks. Then, if you’re finding REX files or Apple loops are more your cup of tea, both file types can be easily dragged and dropped into pad banks.
As for editing sounds, BPM allows you to take a machete to waveforms with your typical editing tools such as normalise, fade in/out, crop, silence, and reverse. Waveforms can also be rendered as one-shot samples or looped as necessary. A single pad can also have a maximum of 256 stereo samples assigned to it, each stereo (or mono) sample being assigned to a separate layer. Layers can be adjusted for panning, volume, and velocity range. That’s some pretty powerful sample triggering. Once your trigger pad or rack bank is set up, the resulting sound can undergo further sculpting via amplitude, filter and pitch envelopes, a selection of 12 styles of filter (with resonance), then routed to effects via three auxiliary sends. These effects cover pretty much every gamut of time and dynamics augmentation, along with distortion algorithms and a global master effect section. Heck, there are even convolution reverb settings in there. The only thing I found lacking in BPM as far as sound design tools were concerned was a dedicated LFO, but then again, considering BPM’s percussion focus, this isn’t really an omission.
MUSIC NON-STOP
As far as amalgamating all the best features of the MPC-style ‘rhythm computer’ into a piece of software, MOTU has pretty much nailed it with BPM – there’s nary an MPC feature missing from this software, and then there’s features galore added for good measure. The obvious rival contender for your money in this particular virtual instrument arena is Native Instruments’ Maschine, but if you’re doing the majority of your work within a DAW and not performing live that often, BPM could be the ideal (and significantly cheaper) way forward. The sounds are great, the programmability is excellent, and the unit dovetails with every DAW platform available – Mac and Windows.
RESPONSES