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BFD 3
Reviewed By Beardedone [all]
April 10th, 2006
Version reviewed: 1.5.39 on Windows
I have been a fan of FXpansion’s Dr008 drum sampler/synthesizer plug-in for years. Dr008 combined with Musiclab’s Drumtools: Slicy&Fillin-Drummer plugins made my initial forays into computer music making fun and productive. I then invested in BFD and my world of drum sounds expanded exponentially. BFD’s huge multilayer kits with microphone placement variations, bleed-through mixing and unprecedented hithat control allow production of drum tracks that I bet even Omar Hakim couldn’t distinguish as being sampled. BFD put me in drum heaven. The only thing I was missing was a brush kit of comparable quality to the deep, spacious kits supplied with BFD.
Along came BFD Jazz and Funk. Brush kits as well as mallet, stick, rod and hand struck Jazz kits. Recorded by John Emrich on Gretsch, Yamaha, Slingerland toms and kicks. The snares: let’s see : Ludwig Super Sensitive, Pearl Free-Floating, Greg McDonald 6x14 inch and an incredible sounding 60’s era Rogers Powertone snare. The latter alone is worth the price of admission. Kit pieces (except the kicks of course) are all available as brush and stick wth sekected rod, mallet and hand hits. I won’t go into the cymbals except to say – Thank you for filling every hihat and cymbal possibility I can think of! Installation was easy but be prepared to patient as there are five (5) DVDs to load. There is, thankfully, the option to install in three formats, 20, 48 or 128 velocity-dependent multilayers. This permits those of us with less than bleeding-edge machines to load kits playable at reasonable latencies. My main DAW PC has a dedicated hard drive for BFD that is rather tiny at 80 GB, so I opted for the intermediate multilayer kits. With the stock BFD plus 48 layer J&F compltet kits this drive is nearly maxed out at 75% though it plays smoothly at 3-6 ms through my RME Multiface II. One thing I should mention is that users can install selected kit pieces and can choose to deselect kit piece they may not use or do not have HD space to install. This came in handy on my laptop system drive (80 GB) where I only installed the brush kits. Even though it is a 5400 rpm Seagate drive with an 8MB buffer I can play BFD at less than 10 ms.
Bravo FXpansion!Read Review
Along came BFD Jazz and Funk. Brush kits as well as mallet, stick, rod and hand struck Jazz kits. Recorded by John Emrich on Gretsch, Yamaha, Slingerland toms and kicks. The snares: let’s see : Ludwig Super Sensitive, Pearl Free-Floating, Greg McDonald 6x14 inch and an incredible sounding 60’s era Rogers Powertone snare. The latter alone is worth the price of admission. Kit pieces (except the kicks of course) are all available as brush and stick wth sekected rod, mallet and hand hits. I won’t go into the cymbals except to say – Thank you for filling every hihat and cymbal possibility I can think of! Installation was easy but be prepared to patient as there are five (5) DVDs to load. There is, thankfully, the option to install in three formats, 20, 48 or 128 velocity-dependent multilayers. This permits those of us with less than bleeding-edge machines to load kits playable at reasonable latencies. My main DAW PC has a dedicated hard drive for BFD that is rather tiny at 80 GB, so I opted for the intermediate multilayer kits. With the stock BFD plus 48 layer J&F compltet kits this drive is nearly maxed out at 75% though it plays smoothly at 3-6 ms through my RME Multiface II. One thing I should mention is that users can install selected kit pieces and can choose to deselect kit piece they may not use or do not have HD space to install. This came in handy on my laptop system drive (80 GB) where I only installed the brush kits. Even though it is a 5400 rpm Seagate drive with an 8MB buffer I can play BFD at less than 10 ms.
Bravo FXpansion!Read Review
