FXPansion BFD

Category:  Products / music software / software instruments

Added: 23-Nov-03  |  Author: admin

New price: £ 208.37 - € 311.00  |   S/H price: Not listed

Company Link:  www.FXpansion.com

FXPansion BFD

The BFD from FXpansion - A sort of cross between modelling and sample playback - sample based drums layed out on an environment where one can select mic sources to model a sound in effect - It's totaly dedicated to acoustic drums therefore and the sounds you can get from those given all the huge variations when you start to add-into the equation things like multi-outs and addition fx..... BFD comes with a potentialy huge library of drumkits given the ability to mix and match drums & use 'in-house' room modelling as well as multiple outs for processing a huge variety of additional FX and sounds - We'll have it up and running for some initial review thoughts as soon as we've got the studio DVD drive sorted out - this product comes on a set of DVD to encompass the 9 or 10 gb or so of samples included...

But after perusing the walkthrough and reading and listening to BFD, some initial thoughts and spec's for you are presented here while a review is being prepared.




I think it also has multi-outs because in the audio examples (below and on the FXpansion site) there's one demo mixed using 'multi-outs' which has then had s/w compressors, etc and a few other touches added to provide a more 'tech' 'effected' sound - Other audio examples show you can acheive live funky breaks - these examples utiles the various 'fill' strokes you can use with each added drum to add perfectly realistic flourishes & subtle rolls, pre-rolls and roll-on roll-off effects in colusion with velocity control! - It really is astoundingly realistic!

You might think a selection of drums from only 6 individual 'kits' is not much, even with the possible permiatations of kit possible, because traditionaly with sample-based drum softs they arrive with a variety of kits. However...

This machine is primarily aimed at reproducing acoustic drum-kit imitations for programming as faithfuly as possible... You get therefore a choice of drumkits to cover all era's and styles historicaly as well as genre-aly cos there's some vintage kits in there too!

BFD takes this palette & faithfuly allows traditional 'room'/realistic drums to be 'modelled' to get drumsounds as far reaching as:

• The hardest metal/industrial rock.
  
• Motown & 60's soul (using also some distortion eq's comps & large outboard verbs).
• Live & studio jazz breaks.
• Classic 'old-vinyl' breaks (if you then rendered the output and added scratch/vinly fx & compression, eq etc).
• Cutting edge RnB & Hip-hop real drum sounds.
• Heavy drums for techno, drum& nbass and any other style of dance
• All commercial applications such as advertising-music imitation cover creations.

If you add this to an analog featured drumbox such as FXPansions own excellent DR008, then you have the best of both worlds - hell!... you could even do Northern Soul with BFD, a twangy guitar, & bass & few other other bits :)


BFD also has a section for adding quantise/feel which pushes drums ahead or behind beat etc - all added together this creates a big variety because a drum-sound is not just the sounds themselves which I think we can say will be fully-covered with BFD, but also the style of the playing, and BFD addresses the ability to imitate styles using these groove facilities, special drum 'stroke' samples and the other effects to model the sound.


Also of course BFD would be superb for traditional 'real drums'/band song-production and other musics' featuring a more 'acoustic' feel can be addressed with ease

Regarding further possible sound sources to add even more variety, possibly in the not very distant future there will be other 'source' sample sets to load, perhaps featuring percussion/latin/african drums and whatever else - I can imagine such an item would be HUGELY popular, although for purely acoustic 'kit' drums themselves in all tasks I can't honestly see anyone wanting MORE sounds given the cross-editable configurations possible as you build and save kits.... Anyways, we'll get a hands-on and post up the results soon.

One thing I want to know with the hands on is about tuning... I can see on the interface images a TUNE control for drums, but I know how it sounds... BFD uses deep layers and streams samples to acheive tit's sounds so how detune will sound I'd like to know anyways... It'd be great to be able to do things like that really detuned old classic reggea snare from the 70's and early 80's... the one that is really detuned & has a really gritty rattly snare-wires sound, like on MPLA by Tapper Zukie or whatever.


Initialy from the superb Shockwave 'walkthrough' it looks to be amazing anyway - You can select drums from I think 6 classic kits as your initial source of basic drums...

each is massively multi-layered and comes with various 'strike' types too - You put together your 'Kit' and can further adjust things like , velocity... You get lower/upper & inside-kik/outisde kik mic adjust controls on the kik and snare.

Add to that the additional 'room' mic's - 'Direct master', 'PZM' & 'Room' each with it's own fader on the MIXER section and also with additional 'width' & 'distance' controls, and you can further adjust the ambient space audio which is all mixed down to the MASTER fader.

If you're into acoustic rock and other drums this looks EXTREMELY interesting and I can't wait to get the DVD drive sorted and get playing.


Checkout some of these audio examples I edited together into a single file - (there's plenty more on the FXpansion BFD site)

BFD kit 1 demo edit hi-fi mp3 (320kb)

There's a 128kb version below in the AUDIO EXAMPLE...

Meanwhile also check the aformentioned excellent Shockwave walkthrough which will explain the software very well in terms of layout.... At the FXpansion BFD site you can hear audio examples too....

Load the BFD Guide




23/12/03 - Got it setup now, and have started to play & investigate - Oh Yes!!.... Superb realism!... I can't think of anything that sounds like this; and while you might get close to this using a quality sampler and a huge multi-layered sampled kits, it still would have what BFD quite has, never mind the expense of setting up such an alternative, and the lack of 'Instant-hit' that BFD gives you - FXPansion have VERY cleverly cornered a market section here. At a time when electronic music rules supreme for chart-backing tracks and the majority of home computer studio's, FXPansion have had ALOT of foresight in my opinion to bring this product to the table. A full review will follow after the new year, but suffice to say, if you work on song production or any other work requiring the reproduction of real kits (and variations one can acheive with real kits & fx etc), BFD is un-touchable! - New kits will be arriving next year apparently to further boost this product. No doubt (or mebbe) FXPansion might licence out 3rd parties to create kits for BFD based on existing or new sample collections... But anyways, a REALLY superb bit of software!

BFD is available on MacOSX as a VSTi, AU, RTAS, Rewire and standalone, and on Win2k/XP as VSTi, RTAS, Rewire, DXi and standalone.

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