Making Music
  Computer Music Software and Hardware

Direct mixing

It's off to the mixer where you can determine exactly how the drums should sound with far more control that you'll get in any studio. On the right of the mixer are four faders controlling the level of the direct, overhead, room and PZM recordings. This means, just to spell it out, that if you want a drier sound, you simply reduce the level of the overhead and room mics, and to create a wetter, more ambient sound, you reduce the level of the direct recording. A good way to work is to turn all the faders down except the direct one, then increase the others to add the amount of ambience that you want.

The ambience faders also have Distance and Width controls which let you shift the microphones further back (a similar effect to pre-delay) and adjust the stereo field of each bus. A cute touch here is that as you adjust these controls, little mics appear and move in the main display area so you can see visually how the adjustments change the Mic position in relation to the kit.

The kick and snare have additional controls. Kick drums were recorded with one Mic inside the drum and one Mic outside. With the In/Out control you can set the balance between the two. The snare has a Top/Bottom control that works in a similar way, balancing between Mics placed on the top and bottom of the snare. These controls only affect the direct bus.

All the drums have a tune control - cue more variations - a trim control for setting the overall volume, and solo and mute buttons. Pan controls vary the stereo placement of each drum's direct signal. If you're using multiple outputs, this doesn't make sense so it's greyed out. The stereo position of the ambient buses is determined by the Width control.

Other controls here are a set of small dynamics controls that increase or decrease the velocity of incoming MIDI notes. Another nice touch is the ability to load and save mixer settings.

Much of the power of the system comes from being able to balance the levels of each of the four recordings to create the exact amount of natural ambience that you want on a drum by drum basis.

Playback time

This is all pretty neat but BFD has more paradiddles in its parlour in the form of the Groove Librarian. This drops down over the main graphic and features three vertical banks with a list of grooves on either side. These are simply MIDI drum patterns. You drag them into the banks and click on them to play them. There are various playback options. For example, you can make a groove repeat until you click on another one and you can shuffle between the grooves in a bank for variety. You can also play grooves from a MIDI keyboard so you can have lots of fun creating your own drum tracks.

Playback can be synced to a sequencer and there are options to ensure patterns only change at the start of a bar. You can also play several grooves at the same time. Other options include humanise, swing and quantise for adjusting the feel of the patterns.

A Bundle is a collection of up to twelve MIDI grooves. You get lots with the program, recorded by professional drummers playing electronic kits, and you can create and save your own. This is an easy way to experiment with patterns and tracks, and an excellent way to hear how the kits sound when all the drums are playing together.

So, with BFD you not only get a very powerful and probably unique set of acoustic drum samples, you also get a nifty interface for experimenting with it all. If one wanted to be picky, one could complain that the interface is a little, well, insipid and lacklustre. A light grey background with ever-so-slightly darker grey text and light sliver icons does not present the most lucid display, particularly on a high res monitor. But that apart, BFD unquestionably lives up to its name.

Is it the ultimate acoustic drum kit? It can't be because FXpansion is in the throes of releasing an expansion pack containing even more drums and called, naturally enough, BFD XFL (no prizes for unravelling the acronym but it's Xtra and it's Large). It should be available by the time you read this. Meanwhile, if you want acoustic drums, you won't get any bigger than these BFDs!