BFD3 Help needed

[midilance]

Is there someone in the L.A. area who is well versed in BFD3 who could help me learn the ins and outs of it? I live in West L.A.

[HCMarkus]

I'm down south in San Diego, but just wanted to say you're gonna love it once you get it BFD3 rockin.

For me, a key element was figuring out where the individual outs show up in DP. I found a post here that provided that info:

It works for me... In Bundles, the stereo outs go to 2 through 16, then the mono outs are odd numbers only, 17, 19, 21, etc.

I was able to set up the mixer in BFD to send to reverbs hosted in DP; essential, because the verb in BFD is not ze finest (imho). I used to bring all the instruments out into DP; now I use the BFD mixer for most of that. Good luck and have fun!

[waxman]

Plus 1

[mhschmieder]

I guess by "ins and outs" you literally meant the routing?

One nice thing about BFD is that you can stage your learning quite easily, by defeaturing stuff you're not ready for. Just mute the outputs you don't want to worry about at first, such as the new ambient mics (not all kit pieces use them anyway).

If you click on a column in the mixer, it often expands or compresses it to/from multiple mics. This too has changed over time, so try not to let that intimidate you. BFD shows you what's available based on the kit pieces chosen, as opposed to an across-the-board commonality across all available kits. For instance, some drums include sub-kick mics.

Think of the routing as hierarchical, or as a multi-buss architecture compared to a traditional analog mixer. If you have experience with such mixer boards, then you'll start to notice the similarities.

I personally am considering switching to HC Markus's approach, but have mostly done mono-only one-track-at-a-time and done the mix in DP, but I put a lot of time into setting balanced levels between the mics and the kit pieces in my BFD presets because then I can better audition a full drum track before I track the individual kit pieces.

It's a little tricky to think about virtual drum mixes, whether inside the VI or not, because the overhead and room mics set their ratios for each kit piece, so I'm not even sure if it makes more sense to do as I currently do and include those when I track each kit piece individually, or disable them and then do a final run of the entire kit for overheads and room mics only.

I think maybe it makes more sense to do the full mix balance inside BFD otherwise, as this seems the only way to guarantee the correct balance within the kit for the overheads and room mics if not tracking individually per kit piece.

I was disappointed when mix presets were removed going from BFD2 to BFD3, but what I do instead now is load an existing preset (of my own -- I can't stand the ones that are provided), and tweak it for new kit pieces and then resave as a new kit preset (at each level: kit, preset, and audio unit preset).

As for mappings, I don't play e-drums so I don't care about that aspect (e.g. IMAP), but it took me awhile to decide BFD3 is the best way to go for the mappings. BFD2 had GM-compatible mappings that only differed in a few places, but BFD3 is wildly different, so it does affect your ability to quickly audition GM-based drum tracks. But you can quickly switch the mapping long enough to audition, then re-map your tracks for BFD3 mappings. I always split my drum tracks by note anyway, before tweaking and tracking.

The newer presets are better as starting points than previous versions or older libraries. I don't use any internal processing due to tracking individually and mixing within DP, but I may revise that workflow because I'm finding the revised plug-in chain quite good quality compared to the old one (which has almost no relationship to the new one).

Fortunately, most of the newer presets for BFD3 and the latest libraries, are fairly conservative in applying effects. This makes them better as learning tools and starting templates.

[mhschmieder]

I almost linked a review from GS, as it goes into a lot of detail, but decided not to as I can't remember if it's OK to do that here. It's easy enough to find at their user reviews sub-site.

I learned at least one new thing from that review, which is that BFD has a cymbal swell feature. I plan to try that out immediately, as I'd rather do that than keep using NI Battery's retro Reverse Cymbal (80's Madonna sound).

The reviewer doesn't like the built-in effects for final production work so pulls the channels into the DAW for actual mixing, just as I currently do, and as third-party plug-ins are not supported in the mixer (although I think they might have been in BFD2), I'm going to keep doing things the way I have been.

So to elaborate on what I said earlier, you can drill as deep or as shallow as you like in BFD's mixer and still get great results. That's what I was getting at earlier; that you can just stick with the top-level outputs, or go crazy and individually output the bottom and top snares, sub-kick (when present), etc., and even separately output (or group) the room and ambient mics.

Many thanks for the posting above that explains where these wind up in DP's channels, as I had forgotten where to look for that myself and remember it being not so easy to find in the BFD3 manual -- a step back from the better-written BFD2 manual, as it skims over (and hides) important details this time around (as well as no longer divulging the microphones used).

Also, to clarify what I meant earlier about live playing vs. MIDI rendering, the two approaches have very different needs.

For MIDI rendering -- which is all that I personally do -- I find it more flexible to get a good balance in the BFD kit but to do external mixing by tracking one kit piece (with ALL of its mics, including ambients and OH's) at a time, as otherwise I'd have to do way more MIDI editing than I already do in order to get a "final" balanced kit stereo track at the outset. For me, that would slow down the workflow too much and also be less flexible in how deep I go at each stage. Just a personal choice.

For live e-drum triggering of BFD, it probably makes more sense to record a single stereo out pair to DP, and to tailor the kit balance to the e-drum kit that you typically use, making whatever adjustments you need to in sensitivity, tuning, etc., wherever it makes the most sense based on the feature set of your e-drums. I have read over and over that BFD is by far the VI of choice for live players of e-drums, due to its detail, layers, and flexibility.

Even for live triggering though -- and especially if using at actual gigs and rehearsals as opposed to just in the studio -- you may still find it advantageous to separately output things from BFD to whatever is next in your signal path (digital or analog mixer, FOH, etc.).

So back to the choices of outputs, you can try to get your kit balance and kit piece mic balances as close as possible to what you'd need for a final balanced mix -- with or without panning -- and the choice of which outputs to treat separately as opposed to keep grouped, comes down to whether you want to apply processing at different levels of the BFD routing (outside BFD itself) and/or whether you have downstream concerns such as a live FOH mixer who wants more control in order to balance with other instruments during a live show.

[HCMarkus]

Many thanks for the posting above that explains where these wind up in DP's channels, as I had forgotten where to look for that myself and remember it being not so easy to find in the BFD3 manual

I couldn't find the info in the manual at all despite searching for a considerable period, but it was right here at UNation all along!

For cymbal swells, I keep a set of stereo audio files around that I recorded specifically to use in productions; swells of varying length and character which, depending on how I edit and compress them in the mix, can serve a huge variety of functions; from long rolling thunder to quick flash floods. The organic equivalent of NI's Rise & Hit.

[mhschmieder]

For cymbal swells, I ended up switching to the recent Wavesfactory product, "Suspended Cymbals", which lets you use the mod wheel to swell, and offers five different cymbals.

I tried the modeled swell feature in BFD first, and found it too hard to control, unless backed out to where it's too subtle and doesn't have the dynamic range I want.

[buzzsmith]

For cymbal swells, I ended up switching to the recent Wavesfactory product, "Suspended Cymbals", which lets you use the mod wheel to swell, and offers five different cymbals.

I tried the modeled swell feature in BFD first, and found it too hard to control, unless backed out to where it's too subtle and doesn't have the dynamic range I want.

I have BFD 2 and use it often, although I'm using Superior Drummer and some extra packs much more in the past couple of years.

I also have the Wavesfactory Suspended Cymbals and find that very useful.

And I do have samples, too. (Actually from the old SampleCell...anyone remember that?!)

Whatever it takes!

Buzzy


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

EDIT: And if you Google "suspended cymbals", etc. you will find some royalty free content and some with a minimum charge.

[James Steele]

I almost linked a review from GS, as it goes into a lot of detail, but decided not to as I can't remember if it's OK to do that here. It's easy enough to find at their user reviews sub-site.

Totally fine with me.

[mhschmieder]

I had to scroll several pages to re-find it, as the search feature is broken (easily provable by searching for either full terms or partial terms of pages you already have open).

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/reviews ... d-3-a.html

There are also some recent reviews of the new Metal Snares library and the Horsepower Drums library -- the latter is an especially nice addition as it plugs a lot of gaps in what BFD offers vs. what Superior and EZDrummer have had for years.