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with a wide array of working methods. For example, some people will not want to
bother with programming in or playing the MIDI notes so the Respond to Song Start,
Auto Groove Repeat, Auto Bundle Shuffle and Auto Fill options are present, making
BFD function as a no-nonsense auto-accompaniment unit which happily plays
along at the host tempo while you compose without requiring any MIDI input.
Humanization…
BFD’s intelligent humanization system offers a great deal of control over the ‘feel’
of Grooves. First of all, the supplied Grooves have been recorded using professional
session drummers playing an electronic drumkit. With the natural swing
and shuffle of the drummer to offer a great deal of natural swing and shuffle,
resulting in drumloops which sound as much like a real drummer as possible. The
Quantization panel allows you to manipulate the feel of the Grooves to your requirements.
Firstly, you can ‘roll off’ the amount of natural feel in the Grooves by varying the
Hard Quantize slider. One of the ways in which BFD’s Grooves achieve their realistic
feel is by playing certain notes slightly before or after ‘where they should be’,
in terms of a hard-quantized, robotic drumbeat. The Hard Quantize slider gradually
moves early or late notes back to strict beat divisions: in other words, making the
feel tighter.
BFD also has a Swing function which works alongside the Hard Quantize. You
can regard the concept of Swing in BFD as a similar one to ‘groove templates’
in sequencers such as Cubase or Logic, which apply a quantization template to
MIDI sequences. BFD ‘s Swing Templates operate by applying a timing template
(chosen via the Template drop-down) over the Groove, which is varied by the
Swing slider. It is applied after the Hard Quantize function, so that the central point
of the Swing slider - i.e. when none of the Swing Template is applied - is the end
result of the Hard Quantize function.
To better understand this, use one of the funkier Grooves, for example those
contained within one of the funk bundles. Move the Hard Quantize slider to the
maximum. You should hear that the timing becomes more rigid and ‘robotic’. Now
move the Swing slider (there is always a Swing Template loaded by default). You
will notice that the timing becomes more syncopated again, but in a more uniform
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