MOTU BPM

Producer may be a word that gets thrown around relatively loosely in the hip hop community... Perhaps I'm what you might consider an emcee that makes beats out of necessity as I strive for self sufficiency in nearly all my endeavors. I have been making beats for many years with experience with the fabled sp1200, the mpc 60/2000/1000, ensoniq eps, etc. I currently use a G5 with Reaper which is an incredibly under appreciated DAW.

I was fortunate to start off with the most current version which is 1.02. Having a background in the beat machines of yesteryear made the transition easier but it was not automatic by any means. It took me a good three days to be comfortable with the interface so as to go about production without thinking about how to do something. To be fair, most pieces that I've owned take me roughly about the same amount of time but I didn't have the same difficulty with Reason a couple years ago despite its seemingly deeper interface. It is still rather plagued with a few annoying bugs but they can be worked around if one is in tune with its rhythms. Anyone who as owned certain gear can get a sense of its freakouts and this is no exception... Hopefully this will be rectified.

Now my experience with the SP has prepped me for the sequencer here as there aren't tracks like on an MPC for instance. Also I find the workflow to be somewhat limited in a similar way... I chop a lot and I am forced to use exclusive groups which kinda work similar to assigning sounds to a particular output in the SP so I am at home here. If I was mainly from an MPC background I would probably be furious at this point at the familiar poly mono and note off workflows simply aren't here as they are in an Akai so be forewarned.

The racks are supposed to function like rack samplers at least that what I gather from using it... Problem is, you can't multisample within a rack, I could be wrong about this but I'll be damned if I can figure it out. Ultimately, it bothers me little as I use BPM kinda like an expanded SP1200 if you will refer to the last passage but this is borderline unacceptable as it almost seems that they want you to buy Mach Five to complement this...

Finally, a Rewire type protocol to track would be super...

Now BPM exceeds here better than anything before it... I used Reason for a stretch and manipulated it with my MPC 60 as the sequencer but ultimately I didn't like the way it "sounded". It would seem to me that software only production lacked that visceral edge I could achieve with an SP1200 as it smashed into the converters. I have been blown away by the sound quality that I have encountered here. This is due in no small part to the great effects that come bundled with this piece. The SP1200 mode that they made a big deal out of sounds pretty good, but being a former owner I can't wholeheartedly say that it replaces the sp as far as edge is concerned but it comes rather close in the end result. The drums bang, the samples are crisp and have presence. All in all, this is the clincher for me as I find it has a bang that just can't be rivaled by too much at this point.

At 279 I find it to be a bargain ultimately. This has convinced me to move into a software exclusive production style which I once thought would be impossible to be frank. One thing I find incredibly misleading is that it says you only need 1GB of RAM to get busy. I had 2GB and found this to be lacking. I upgraded to 4GB to get the stability that I depend on. Without this breathing room, it will overload your CPU quite easily and cause erratic performance at best. Whoever stated that these requirements were accurate should amend them without delay as it is very misleading and MOTU has awful customer service, for the record. Once the bugs are worked out, this will take its rightful place next to the MPC and the SP as far as hip hop production is concerned at least to those who embrace change...

I am a professional music producer/songwriter. Been making music for over 2 decades. Have experience with all manner of analog and digital gear. I have several gold and platinum records, with well-known artists. Have done soundtrack work for film and T.V. Well-versed in Logic Audio and Pro Tools. This product was used with Pro Tools and in Stand alone mode.

The interface is based(so they say) on 'the popular drum machines of the '80's and '90's, but is missing many essential(and simple) operational elements of those machines(so, I suppose it is not very intuitive). e.g. you cannot disable the metronome(or even turn it down at all) without stopping the machine from playing, and opening the preferences dialog box. Even then because of a bug, once you disable it, it continues to play. You must open this dialog box a second time with no other action(then close it again) for the change to take effect. The manual is very vague with important points. Motu tech support is also not very helpful, as I don't think any of them have enough experience with it yet to even understand it. As a result, they practice 'customer avoidance'. Now, I bought this because I wanted a software Drum Machine. It does a lot of other things but I thought this would be its' first priority, and it failed miserably.

Now on the plus side, the drum library(though a relatively small part of BPM's 15G library) is pretty good, having been mastered in N.Y. at Sterling Sound. A mastering facility I have actually used. Good punchy sounds. Great for pop, r&b, hip-hop, and other genres of music. The sound of the software is quite good. But what good is that if you can't get it to operate properly?

I bought it thinking it would be the software answer to the MPC. But believe me, it's not. I thought Guru had problems, but next to this, Guru is practically perfect. Huge CPU hog. Has crashed, simply by closing the program window(not the program itself. But maybe that's not a bug?). The metronome(big issue for me) operates autonomously. When you press record, an automatic 1 bar count ensues(also unavoidable, you can't disable it), and it plays. If you turn the overall machine volume up or down, the metronome does not change. Turn the machine all the way down? Metronome. If you fight with this long enough, the metronome will play whether the machine does or not. You have to quit the program to make it stop. Beware.