BeatFriend Part 1: Unboxing and day one twiddlings

video upload by Richard DeHove

"This is my first 24 hours using the BeatFriend by Audio.Computer. It's a long, raw example of discovering the machine rather than a tightly edited batch of best-ofs. The idea is to show what you'd typically get if you bought one yourself.

The concept of the Beatfriend is beautifully simple: A CR-78-style machine with preset patterns that you can tweak with a few interesting parameters combined with complexity sliders for each track.

Some other demos I heard prior to getting the BeatFriend were, to my ears, a bit "wooly". Main culprit there is the filter knob. At the midway point it has the classic CR-78 EQ profile which is very dull imo. Only when you open things up a bit do you get some better dynamics but then the more you turn the less it sounds like a CR-78. Horses for courses. Big surprise for me was the distortion control which can change the mood from cheesy to weird very fast.

The sound you hear hasn't been subsequently manipulated in any way other than some reasonably hard limiting on the output to smooth everything out.

All up there's lots to like here and am looking forward to some much deeper experiments in the next video.

0:00 Unboxing & blab
2:00 Twiddle 1
6:30 Twiddle 2
11:35 Twiddle 3
13:01 Twiddle 4
21:36 Conclusion blab

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