FXpansion BFD Premium Acoustic Drum Module - Manual (Page 55)

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8:9 Creating and importing your own Grooves and Fills
BFD’s Grooves and Fills use the standard MIDI fi le format. This makes it easy to create
and import your own Grooves. It is advisable to import MIDI fi les with only one track. If
BFD encounters a fi le with multiple tracks, it will import only the track with the largest
amount of notes (most likely to be the drum track).
Tips on creating Grooves
• You can use any MIDI sequencer which allows the export of MIDI fi les.
• Load BFD into the sequencer to program or record the sequences you want to convert into
Grooves.
• You can also import any commercial or freeware MIDI fi les you have, using the import function
in your sequencer (some sequencers also allow dragging MIDI fi les from the operating system
fi le browsers right into the arrange page). Make sure that the notes in the MIDI fi les corre spond
properly with BFD’s key assignments: you may need to do some editing of the MIDI data in order to
achieve this.
• Grooves can be of any length. BFD’s Grooves tend to be of shorter bar lengths, but there’s no
reason why you shouldn’t use longer ones.
• Please also remember that, in general, each Groove must be written for any particular time
signature. If presented with a Groove which is intended for a different time signature than the
current one, it will do one of two things. If the Groove's time signature has more beats in the bar
than the current time signature, then the notes within the extra beats are cut off. If the Groove's
time signature contains less beats in the bar than the current time signature, then the Groove will
be repeated until the end of the bar.
Importing Grooves into BFD
You can import Grooves into BFD in a number of ways. Remember to save the Bundle
fi le afterwards for future use by clicking the Save Bank button under each Bank. It is
best to save it in the BFD/Grooves folder, or in BFD/Fills if it is a Fill Bundle, so that it
appears in the Browsers.
Drag and Drop
If your host supports drag & drop export, you can import MIDI sequences straight into
BFD from the sequencer’s arrange page by dragging and dropping it onto a Groove slot
in a Bank.
Open MIDI fi les
Use your sequencer’s MIDI export function to save MIDI sequences to standard MIDI
format. BFD supports both Type 0 and Type 1 MIDI fi les. Organize your Grooves into
subfolders within the BFD/Grooves or BFD/Fills folders for convenience.
You can then import these sets of MIDI fi les into a Groove slot in a Bank by double-
clicking on the slot and locating and selecting a MIDI fi le in the File Open dialog which
appears. You can fi ll multiple slots by selecting up to 12 MIDI fi les: the MIDI fi les will be
distributed in sequential slots going up from the original slot which was clicked.
Chapter 8: The Groove Librarian