MOTU BPM Complete Beat Production Software Review – Part One
By Paul Dakeyne
| Posted in Music Technology
The contemporary DJ/Producer/Musician or Artist has numerous weapons of choice these days when it comes to drums, percussion and all things related. Some solutions, whether software or hardware are pure ‘beat-bashing’ rhythm machines, some offer extended sound palettes, editing and audio manipulation and some are bundled within a users DAW environment or sit as a third-party plug-in. MOTU BPM is one such (granted, more urban and electronic focused) software package that attempts to be all things to all men, and in fact live up to its tagline of, ‘the complete beat production environment’.
BPM arrives old-school stylee in a large, glossy box with a ‘proper’ printed manual and installer CD, on top of the two core sound library DVD’s. Installation is simple enough and authorisation is via the included BPM-specific iLok key and a visit to MOTU’s website. The 15GB of bundled samples, loops and instruments (all new and bespoke to BPM) need to be copied to a specific folder on your hard drive and remain there for the program to see them each time it runs. As would be expected from such a potentially monstrous rhythm and instrument application, it functions on both Mac and PC, in both standalone form and as a plug-in (MAS,AU,VST or RTAS) – making it compatible with Logic, Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Sonar, Live and Cubase etc. Strangely, I could only get BPM to appear on my Mac OSX system as a standalone app. Logic 9, for some unknown reason, wasn’t recognising the relevant ‘components’ in the audio>plug-ins folder [I'll speak to MOTU about this and report back with a sub-note below].
As a feature run down – so you can get an immediate picture of just how comprehensive this software package is from the off – MOTU BPM allows the combination, playback and editing of hundreds of 24bit/96Khz quality drum patterns, drum-kits, loops and individual sounds/instruments. The sixteen virtual pads accommodate (triggering and editing of) individual drum sounds, samples, instruments and ‘scenes’ (more on those later), which in total give 64 units of control. A drum synthesizer section enables the user to model their own bespoke percussion sounds, working nicely alongside a sampling feature to layer the aforementioned 16 pads with velocity-sensitive and even random-selection multi-layers.
A legacy user-friendly step-sequencer and the handy dynamic expression graph sequencer provide real-time pattern record/overdub/edit and parameter adjustment automation respectively. And, being a software solution inspired by some of the great drum machines again of days gone by, the MOTU BPM has plug and play compatibility with hardware controllers such as the Akai MPD16, MPD32, KORG padKONTROL and the M-Audio Trigger Finger, plus a gritty emulation mode for replicating the sound quality (or lack of) of the EMU SP1200 beatbox.
The two ‘rack modules’ are, together, one of the powerhouse elements of BPM. These can hold ‘parts’, which in essence are loops, audio phrases and instrument sounds. These racks, their content and in fact the program as a whole enjoy complete compatibility with Apple Loops, AIFF, WAV and REX files with drag (off the desktop) and drop (into BPM) functionality added for icing on the cake.Via pad triggering (or MIDI keyboard for that point), these parts combine to make ‘scenes’, which can be sequenced to form the basis of a complete song arrangement, with sections extended and shortened swiftly with the click of a mouse. New in this current 10.5 version of MOTU BPM and related to the rack module sequencing is the ARP function – able to work on each individual rack part, this applies a once-again familiar and traditional control interface, from which experts and novices alike should glean good results.
The loop-editing capability too has been upped on this new version of BPM, with enhanced loop slicing. Within BPM’s clip window, loop slices can be added and edited, with create, move, lock and mute features also present. Keeping the world of the familiar always at the forefront, the software’s do-it-in-your-sleep-style piano roll editor should keep all and sundry happy when in programming duties and, for some on-board sound enhancements, a selection of standard – though as we’ll see later quite impressive – FX (delays, reverbs, modulation, dynamics and distortion etc) also up the ante. As if this and the above wasn’t enough, MOTU BPM really does wear that ‘complete’ badge with pride when you discover that every individual sound source the user has running can be routed through its on-board mixer – nice indeed.
So there we have it – a reasonably-detailed introduction to the multitude of show-off features contained within the MOTU BPM beat production software. In tomorrow’s part two of this review, I’ll be looking at the bundled sound library and how the application uses the above feature sets when creating and editing beats, loops and samples.
Tags: BPM, drum, motu, percussion, Sampler, Sequencer, software