FXpansion BFD2 review
By MNJ
| Posted in Music Technology
FXpansion BFD2 is an integrated or standalone acoustic drum environment supported by all DAWs offering up to 32 pieces of drums and percussion plus extensive control over velocity, tuning and ambience. Including an on-board comprehensive mixer, effects, and 5000 programmed grooves, BFD2 is designed to provide realistic and convincing acoustic drums for music production at all levels.
Just reading the requirements for installing BFD2 convinces me that it means business – as well as requiring a minimum of 2GB of RAM, BFD will take up a whopping 55GB of hard disk space, preferably on a dedicated drive. Having once used a very early version of BFD which took up 9GB of space (it seemed colossal at the time), I was prepared for a long install. In the end it wasn’t too bad, and in about an hour I was up and running. FXpansion’s authorisation process is very straightforward so once I was legal I set about perusing the manual. It’s long – 180 pages long in fact. However, unlike a lot of software manuals it’s well laid out, reasonably easy to understand, and to get the best out of BFD2 you will need to read it.
What I liked about the original version of BFD was the ‘in the same room’ realism of the drum sounds. Even then, and I’m talking about six years ago, the individual sounds and the kits were very impressive indeed. What I didn’t like though was the limited amount of programmed rhythms and the lack of detailed control over the kit pieces. Happily, BFD2 bears absolutely no relation to this first attempt except that the emphasis is still on the quality and realism of the drums. All the samples have been re-recorded at Air Lyndhurst studios with high quality studio microphones in multiple positions, using Prism A/D converters for the highest possible quality audio.
BFD2 is divided into three main parts – the kits, the mixer and the grooves. For this review I set myself a basic task, to create a great sounding kit, pick out a basic groove to apply it to, and then drop it into a ProTools session as a MIDI file. Auditioning kicks, snares, hats and cymbals and collecting them into a cohesive set of skins, although time consuming, is the fun part of BFD2, although there are preset kits to choose from as a basis of creating an individual drum set.
There are a lot of options for each kit piece in the way of velocity, dynamics and tuning but such a lot of work has obviously gone into creating the default settings that I found I didn’t need to stray too far from them, if at all. Mic bleed is also controllable between the kick and snare for added realism, and there are two channels in the mixer for the kick – one for the mic inside the drum and one for the mic placed in front. Three channels on the mixer are dedicated to the snare, representing different mic positions. Sounds, kits and grooves all have to be loaded each time, but if your computer is up to snuff, it’s only a few seconds to wait.
Effects include compression and EQ, all of which are easily accessed in the insert section of the mixer. I found the markings on the effects controls very hard to read although there’s a comprehensive set of preset settings on each effect, which I believe will be good enough a lot of the time. After creating a rather good sounding kit consisting of a DW kick, snare, toms and some Sabian cymbals, I loaded a groove. The programmed rhythms are sorted into genres such as rock, country, metal, reggae and more, and then into one or two bar loops which load into the Groove Engine. A ‘velocity lane’ allows detailed control of the various hits within the bar which if used with subtlety will add a proper human feel to your pattern. Notes can be moved, added or erased for custom rhythms and saved as a user preset. Care should be taken to save all three parts of your new drum kit, the mixer settings and the assigned groove when quitting otherwise edits will be lost.
BFD2 will also accept external samples as WAV files and as I had an old set around I decided to import a sound. I choose a rather thumpy and artificial sounding kick drum which I then added to the kick I’d programmed. The whole kit now had a massive, thudding low end. Wonderful stuff. The basic kit is a 10 piece, but having the option to use either a 15 or 32 piece kit means that all the extra percussion or imported sounds can be auditioned alongside the main drums.
The drag and drop feature dumped the groove on the desktop as a MIDI file and then into the MIDI track in ProTools and there it was, a pristine sounding, realistic drum loop as the basis for building a track. Mission accomplished. The massive groove library is going to take some time to explore as will the routing options on the mixer and the MIDI mapping facilities, but it’s the actual drum sounds which are the stars here. If your computer can take the punishment, treat it to a copy of BFD2.
Tags: BFD2, Fxpansion, prism ad converters