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FXpansion's BFD

BFD is FXpansion's latest foray into the sampled drum machine market. Does it live up to its name...

The proliferation of DVD drives seems to have positively encouraged software developers to fill DVDs with samples. And FXpansion is no different. The company is primarily known for its software drum modules and the DR-005 or DR-008 may well be residing in a few plug-in folders. 

BFD, subtitled Premier Acoustic Drum Module, is a collection of acoustic drum samples. Not just any samples but what is probably the most comprehensive sampling of acoustic drum kits ever, comprising seven main kits plus lots of other drum samples, too. What does BFD stand for? FXpansion is rather coy, saying only that it's Big and it's Drums so users have a range of words to choose from to complete the acronym. Oh, those wags...

The pack includes both PC and Mac versions and stand-alone and plug-in versions for both platforms. Along with support for VST, DXi, RTAS, AudioUnit and CoreAudio, there's also a ReWire interface which you need for multiple outputs in programs such as ProTools, Acid and Digital Performer.

Installation is easy. Mac users note that it only runs under OS X. Windows users note that although it should run under Windows 98SE and ME it's only guaranteed to work under 2000 and XP and that's all that's officially supported. All users take note of the 9Gb of HD space required for the samples.

Getting kitted out

The user interface places all the elements necessary to control the drums into a compact interface. However, the display is not large and doesn't rescale, and it looks small on a high resolution monitor.

The first thing to do is load one of the seven drum kits. Click on the drum kit selector button and you see an illustration and description of the seven kits. After selecting a kit, the samples load. This can take a wee while.

Clicking on the drum kit graphic at the top of the screen opens the kit display area which lays out the drums used in the kit. You can play them by clicking on their individual images, the higher up you click, the greater the velocity and you can immediately get a feel for the range of sounds produced by a single (but multi-sampled) drum.

Down the left of the screen are seven drum selectors - kick, snare, hit hat, toms, and three cymbals. Clicking on these lets you replace drums in the kit with different drums. If the snare in a kit isn't quite what you want, you can replace it with one of 15 others. Clicking on a selector brings up graphics of the available drums for that slot and placing the mouse over an image reveals details of the drum including the different types of hit in the sample.

You can save new drum collections as kits and have them appear in the list when you click on the kit selector button. If you have a favourite kit, you can make it load by default.

Having created a kit, you can then play it from a MIDI drum kit, a MIDI keyboard (by far the best way to get a feel for it if you're not a drummer), or play drum patterns through it from a sequencer. And then the fun really starts...

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