JAKE COON: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Jake Coon, and today we're going to be taking a look at the Behringer BCF-2000. It's the eight-channel fader version. They also offered the BCR-2000 which is an eight-channel rotary version which features 24 rotary knobs instead of the faders. We'l be showing you how to use it today with Ableton Live, and let's go ahead and take a closer look.

Alright, so as you can see here, we have eight faders. They are motorized. They are 100 mm through so they're rather long through. Over here to the right, we have four different assignable buttons. Not quite transport, which I wish we had on here but still functional. We have the preset buttons above that for the 32 different presets. It's nice to have 32 different presets on this. It allows you to do many different things to control your DAW and also any software synths you have running independently on another setup.

Above that, you have the basic buttons for the beat control itself: the store, edit, exit, and learn, and these are all the different ways to program the different MIDI controls and MIDI functions, and also learn allows you to send the MIDI functions from the DAW to the controller in order for it to be assigned that way, so it's kind of flexible in that way.

You have above that two rows of eight buttons each. I typically use them just for channel on and off, to arm the record. You can use them for anything you like. Above that, we have a row of encoders. They are LED so they do show the active value. They're infinitely rotating so they're not detented at all; it's a nice smooth rotation. They also have a push function on them, which can be assigned separate function from the rotor itself. We have four different encoder groups per preset, which is a nice function, so you have up to 64 different knobs and buttons, so you can turn the filter off, turn an effect off, whatever you like to do, effect a macro.

And on the back of this controller, you can see we have the MIDI footswitch function. There is an A and a B jack for two separate switches. There's also the ability for the A jack to use a dual jack input; in that case, the B jack is rendered non-functional. It connects via USB like we have mentioned before, and it also has the standard MIDI in, out, and thru, so if you want to go ahead and use this in conjunction with the rotating knob one, you can do that as well.

Now we're going to check it out in the context of a live performance. I'm also able to use this controller as a live performance controller. You can deactivate the motorized faders so you don't do any damage to the motors during a live performance, which is another nice function of this controller. So, I basically created some stock Ableton loops here, we've put them together, and I'm just going to show you few of the functions you're able to do, the versatility of this controller.

[JAKE STARTS RUNNING ABLETON LIVE]

And I have the buttons up here just simply assigned to the track on and off. You see the yellow start to glow as I drop in parts.

[JAKE ACTIVATES OTHER PARTS ON ABLETON LIVE USING BCF-2000]

And as you start mixing these different parts, bringing them in louder, turning up the bass and whatnot, you're going to see the faders move on the screen as well with your movements. To take the mallets out here, take them out up there, and push them simply back up. On top, we have the rotary encoders on the first group set to the panning, so say you want to take your mallets over to the left side, you're just going to go ahead and move your rotary encoder ove to the left. You're going to find that your LED will also reflect that change so you can see that.

Now, as you switch over to the other encoder groups I haven’t sent over to the aux send A and aux send B, you'll see that the LEDs reset to the setting of those different aux sends. So, the A send is closed on the bass, which is the first one and it's open on the fourth one. We're going to send the mallets on the fourth channel in to that Beat Repeater which I've been going through.

[JAKE SENDS MALLETS TO BEAT REPEATER USING BCF-2000]

Then you can send any other part that you'd like to just by using the aux sends, and that's just one encoder group. You can also turn the deconstruct on and off if you like to by using the push function.

So that's the use of the encoder groups. They're actually quite flexible. But then using, like I said before, using the 32 different presets is going to allow you, say I have 16 channels here. If I switch to the second preset, these faders would automatically move to the settings for those channels, which is another great function of the [INAUDIBLE].

So, that was the Behringer BCF-2000. Thank you for watching Gearwire.Com. My name is Jake Coon, and we'll see you next time.