User Guide

Part Three: INTRODUCING THE GROOVE LIBRARIAN…

To initiate the Groove Librarian, start by clicking the pull-down bar at the top of

BFD’s interface.

You will see three ‘Banks’ of Grooves, ﬂanked by a tree-view ‘browser’ on either

side. The Groove Browser on the left is for what we call ‘Grooves’: essentially MIDI

drumloops. Meanwhile, the right-hand side browser is the Fill Browser. Fills are

exactly the same format as Grooves: they are just regarded as ‘Fills’ for conve-

nience. The Banks are where you drag in Groove ‘Bundles’ from the browsers:

there are two Banks for Grooves (Bank A and Bank B) and another for Fills.

A Bundle is a group of up to twelve MIDI Grooves, a large range of which are

supplied with BFD. There are two distinct types of Bundles: ‘Groove Bundles’ and

‘Fill Bundles’. There are two general-purpose Groove Bundles and a Fill Bundle

loaded by default into the Banks.

Instant gratiﬁcation…

Now click on any of the Grooves listed in Bank A. You will notice that the

Groove plays through for its duration, and then stops. Now click the Auto

Groove Repeat A button on the right of the BFD interface. The Groove will now loop

until another is clicked.

Please note that this method is usually for auditioning the Grooves. The Grooves

are mainly intended to be played from the MIDI keyboard (or alternative MIDI

input device). All the three loaded Bundles are mapped to the keyboard: in fact,

the keys used are reﬂected in the black and white slots in each Bank, which

represent the actual keys on the keyboard. Therefore, the ﬁrst beat in a Bundle

is shown at the bottom, reﬂecting how it would appear in your sequencer’s piano

roll, for example.

The actual keys which correspond to each Bank of Grooves depend on your host

- numbering conventions vary between sequencers. Cubase and Logic start their

octave numbering from C-2, rather than C0 on Sonar and FL Studio, for example.

You will have noticed that there are key numbers displayed on each Bank slot.

BFD attempts to detect the sequencer used and changes its naming convention