BFD drum opinions

T

travelin travis

New member
I did'nt get any response in the drum forum so I posted here.

If you have used it or own it, what is your opinion? At the moment, I'm thinking it sounds like doo doo. Does anyone have any mixes using BFD that actually have a convincing acoustic drum line? I'm using a Edirol PCR-30 controller keyboard to trigger BFD in Sonar 4. I have yet to come out with a realistic drum sound. I've triied all the kits, played with all the mic levels, etc. Where in the hell did all the hype for the plugin come from?
 
BFD and DFH and all those newfangled drum plugins share one thing -- HUGE samples. The samples big enough that it takes a serious amount of ram to run these at their optimum sound power and anything less than that will sound less than stellar.

My advice is that without a gig of ram don't even try BFD and expect good results. If you have a gig of ram there are other factors that may be preventing you from achieving good results - like the preferences you ticked when setting up the plugin.
 
I'm running 768 mb ddr. It runs smooth with no dropouts, clicks, etc. If anyone actually has BFD and has more than 1gb ram, we could compare the sound quality using the same midi track, kit setup, and settings. I really don't think that ram is gonna change the sound quality of BFD. Maybe someone could prove me wrong. Any takers?

Right now, I get better results using Reason or Vsampler and the Natural Studio Kit samples.
 
I haven't heard any sound quality improvement when I had 768MB 2100 RAM to when I upgraded to 1GB of 3200RAM with BFD...
When I load BFD my meters for Procesor and RAM don't change too much.

While BFD recommends a nice chunk of RAM, I don't think you really need THAT much- though it doesn't hurt. Now, softsynths on the other hand, they like the RAM and processor.

I've heard BFD sound stale and not that authentic and I've heard it sound really damn real, like a live kit.

My friends use BFD to a real sounding extent, everyone that went to their studio was damn impressed and asked how much was BFD and most of them bought it. Unfortunately they don't have any of those songs up for you to hear. And the new stuff they do have is from their most recent studio sessions where the drummer decided to use live drums for the album now.

I would post clips, but I haven't gotten to a point where I've fine-tuned drums at all. So, they sound looped and not-live (for the most part).
 
You are NOT going to get a finished kit sound out of the box. Like tracking a real kit, when mixing BFD you will need to gate, compress, and eq to have the kit as a whole sit in the mix and sound convincing.
 
IMO, based on the clip, you need to do 3 things.

Volume-drums louder in the mix (maybe eq also)

Panning-it seems like panning is stationary and not wide enough.

Humanizing-make the velocities and hit times slightly imperfect.
 
Omg!!

Hey all, BFD is great piece of drumming software. FWIW, BFD or DFH or anything else close should give you as good a drum sound as you can get without a real drummer. If you can't, it's not the software. 99% of people listening to music
don't care that the snare should be gated more or the release on the tom's compression should be longer/shorter. If it's not
too loud/soft and sits ok in the mix and drives the song, that's all it has to do. With BFD's built in mixer and mic placements, you should have NO PROBLEM getting a decent mix.
 
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