FXpansion BFD ECO review
| Posted in Music Technology
BFD ECO is a new entry-level version of the mighty BFD2, which was reviewed last week on DV247 Blog. However, calling it entry-level is not to demean this product in any way, and its release will make the BFD drum sounds and functionality accessible to a lot more potential users. For anybody who has been creating drum tracks with the free plug-ins that come with some of the hardware or software DAWs and are dissatisfied with the sometimes artificial and processed sound of the drums on offer, BFD ECO will breathe a bit of life into proceedings. After all, the samples in BFD are of real drums, recorded in a top studio, with select microphones.
The BFD mantra has always been about realism, which is why they have gone to great lengths to create sounds that are as accurate and articulate as possible. Even though there’s a fair bit of compromise with the ECO version – presumably ECO is short for ‘economy’ and is nothing to do with saving the planet – the drum sounds are based on the BFD2 engine and having loaded it up and had a good play around, I must say that the simplicity of it is actually very appealing.
BFD ECO has three pages to look at – the kits, the channel and the groove engine, while the mixer section is always present at the bottom of the screen. Loading up a preset from the Preset picker gives you the entire kit including default tunings and dampings as well mixer options like added effects and a groove chosen from one of the 1500 on-board rhythms. Kit pieces, effects, grooves and mixer settings can all be edited from here, or you can simply load a kit and audition the individual pieces.
There are five kick drums, six snares, 12 toms and three hats as well as 11 cymbals and six percussion instruments with which to assemble custom kits. Each channel has two auxiliary sends so individual drums can be treated with their own effect and each effect has a drop-down preset menu of useful settings geared towards your selection. ECO includes the Overload Breverb plate reverb as well as compressor, EQ and filter, all of which are editable to a certain level.
Loading time for kits and kit pieces is very sharp – massively useful when it comes to auditioning individual drums or cymbals while a groove is playing so see which particular sound works. There is enough choice of kicks, snares and hats to assemble some classic sounding kits which can then be saved in the preset menu. Where ECO does differ from BFD2 here is that you cannot load your own samples. However all the available expansion packs will work with the program.
BFD ECO contains a very basic ‘track’ where grooves can be loaded and edited. There are repeat, cut, copy and paste functions which all work in the normal way and once you’ve got the hang of the red marker, composing a drum track is a fairly straightforward affair. For instance, dragging a four bar sequence on to the track, clearing the fourth bar and inserting a fill is very quick and easy (though remember to clear the bar otherwise the fill will play on top of the original groove). Once composed, the entire track can be exported as a WAV file, which can then be dragged into a session on your DAW. Grooves can be dragged straight onto a MIDI track if you want to edit the pattern in detail.
Damping, dynamics and tuning is available in ECO, and a comprehensive range of effects is included. The drag and drop functions make integration with your host’s MIDI functionality easy and quick and of course there’s the top feature, the sounds. I’m going to repeat myself – it’s the sounds. Once you’ve used real drum samples, I’m afraid there’s very little chance of returning to the processed variety, unless of course they are appropriate for your style of music. Real drums only taking up 5 Gb of space on your drive? It can only be BFD ECO.
Tags: BFD Nano, BFD2, fxpansion Eco