Compare DFH superior to BFD

  • Thread starter Thread starter thewanderer24
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haha well i had never done anything in MIDI at all until i got DFHS. it's really pretty simple, all the steps leading up to and after actually mapping out the song are really simple. and it's kinda fun. but if you're good at drumming and have the tools to record, then you don't really need DFHS. spend your $250 on another mic or something, hehe.
 
TravisinFlorida said:
Forget about the drum plugins. You have real drums and seem to be getting along fine. The subtleties and feel of a real kit outweigh the sound quality and flexibility of plugins, imo. I'd take a cheap kit and mikes over a plugin any day.
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Thanks. Yeah I'm sticking with my real drums, but I am really lost on how people 'build' drum tracks using software or even never having played a kit. I have no clue as to how they do it. I was just curious and looking for a little knowledge. I'm sure its easier than it seems, but damn I got a headache just trying to follow along with Zed's explanation. Lots of technical computer type stuff. Now, where's my drumsticks? :p
 
I personally dont have the expertise to program drums or drum patterns. I know one pattern :D

For this project I am doing, I plan on getting a real drummer IF I can afford it. Since it is a union gig, its just absurd. The musicians union is similiar to the UAW in that they are screwing themselves outta work by setting prices so high. For a 3 hour session:

$90 per hour, 3 hour minimum
25% charge on top of that
1 hour break ( out of 3 :eek: )

So you pay $337.50 for two hours in a studio. Considering its a whole CD, you can see my interest in fake drums :D It's not my money, but still I am responsible for presenting a reasonable budget to make it happen.
 
check it out Greg_L, here's what you're lookin at when i'm talking about the "piano roll" view. this is in Cubase LE, since i don't have reaper on this computer (at work), but it's basically the same deal in all programs. you use the pencil tool to write in a sequence of hits, and each key is assigned to a drum sound (DFHS has it's own keymap so you know which is which). i just randomly drew a pattern on here for demonstration purposes, hopefully this'll help you get an understanding of how it works.
 

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Greg_L said:
Damn, I need to be union! :eek:
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Most of the recording is moving to Eastern Europe because of this. A lot of the movie scores are done there for one-tenth the price. I only get a few sessions a year, they just arent here. Ive done plenty of non-union ones, although technically you are not allowed. In Seattle they were paying $60 an hour for non-union and the union made a big stink. Therefore, they now get $0 an hour because nobody wants to pay $337 for two hours. When you do symphonic stuff, its insane.

We did one last week, and we had so much music to record in such a short time that we just slopped through it. No time to go back and fix anything.
 
what makes DFHS so cool is that all the hits are sampled several times at several different velocities, so you can vary the velocity of hits in the midi editor to make it sound much more realistic, plus it's not just playing the same sample over and over again, it randomly picks from a huge pool of samples for each single piece of the kit. so it's a lot deeper than just a simple drum sampler.
 
Okay I've seen that before. I have cubase LE. I've done as much as what you have on your screenshot there, but I couldn't hear it through the firepod. I was just clicking buttons and shit and made a picture similar to that. I think I switched the drivers and got it to come out of the computer speakers, but there was a ton of latency and I couldn't figure out how to get it to an audio track. It was just piano sounds when i was jacking with it.
 
what you would do in cubase is go to Devices and click VST Instruments, then load the DFHS plugin from there.

then on the in/out MIDI track in your project, you click on "out" and select "Drummer" from the list. that sets it up so that the MIDI output runs through the DFHS plugin, so whenever you hit a key on the piano roll, it will play a drum sound.

i don't think Cubase LE has any plugin delay compensation (Reaper does) so that kinda sucks. but anyway once you map out the whole song in MIDI, DFHS will bounce it to wav files for you.

you just have to arm Record in the "bounce" section of DFHS, then playback the song so that DFHS can record all the hits, then click bounce to write it to WAV.

you can also control the amount of bleed that each mic gets in DFHS, so you can get a more "roomy" sound, which really can help the drums to come alive. once you get all the wavs bounced, you can load each one to its own track in Cubase and disregard the MIDI section (i usually just mute the MIDI track instead of deleting it, in case i want to go back and change something). once all the wav's are loaded, then it's just like mixing recordings of a real drum set.
 
Okay, so does the software record and bounce the drum parts as one complete track, or can you isolate the kick, snare, etc into its own tracks?
 
i didn't know that dfhs had a bounce feature. that's handy. greg, any drum plugin that has multiple outputs can be used to create individual tracks for each kit piece, overheads, room, etc.
 
it bounces everything to individual tracks.

there's a couple ways to split it also. i believe there's an option to mic up the bottom side of the toms, the kick batter, and the option to split the OH into individual cymbals. i just use the stereo overhead for cymbals though, much simpler.

but generall you get:
Kick
Hi Hats
Snare Top
Snare Bottom
Tom 1
(whatever other toms you have)
Overheads
Room
 
and like i said, before you bounce it, there's a screen in DFHS where you can adjust the levels of the drums for EACH microphone. so there's like a "mixer" screen, and let's say you select the Hi Hat mic for example, you can go thru the mixer and adjust how loud all the other pieces will bleed into the hi hat mic when it's bounced. this gives you a ton of control over the sound of the kit.

also, for each drum, you can adjust the way the sample is triggered. one of the cool features is the "semi sequential" button. this makes it so that if you trigger an event thats "medium" in velocity, it will randomly choose from hits that are within that velocity, as well as ones that are just below or above in velocity. that way you get a ton of variation in the sound and it becomes much more realistic sounding. it works nicely on hi hats.
 
considering that DFHS is like 40GB worth of samples, i dunno if they have a free trial version, hehehe

sorry pal!
 
Lol. I figured as much, I just mean like a smaller demo model.

Hell, it's probably best I don't play with this kind of stuff. I don't need another reason to sit at the computer all day. :p
 
you can use sfz soundfont player plugin and natural studio kit soundfont to play around with. it sounds pretty good but you only get a stereo out. it's free.
 
i'll be happy to do drums for you for a song if you want! that way you can get an idea of how it sounds. i did some DFHS drums for one of nukeitout's songs, check it out here:


the drums i did for that song are pretty simple, and i really didn't have to spend a lot of time on it, but it sorta gives you an idea of how they sound.

also check this tune out:
http://www.soundclick.com/util/getplayer.m3u?id=4962389&q=hi

it's a short punk rock tune i did in DFHS, way too loud. :D
 
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