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mhschmieder wrote:
Although I have an exhaustive 72-page long crib sheet of sound sources that I keep active and generally try to keep prioritized and detailed, it would be too time-consuming for me to try to extract the list of what is in BFD Percussion. Hopefully the link above is good enough. It is a shame that fxpansion re-did their website and took away the kit piece audition feature.

Is your crib sheet in Excel or Word? Maybe their sort function could help you out with pulling out the BFD stuff. The manual on the page I linked to has the instruments listed as they appear on dvd's and even then they're not alphabetical. Bit of a pain but at least the data is there. I used to love the audition feature - I'd crank up the monitor speakers on my internet machine and play them and the wife would wonder what I'm listening to

It's a simple RTF file that I edit with Apple TextEdit.

I haven't yet thoroughly (as opposed to casually) cross-referenced it to eliminate and combine "alternate named instruments" but generally list alternates in parentheses so that I can find them via text search.

As an example, after much research I learned that "sanza" is the most accepted form to describe the entire family of thumb piano instruments (which includes the Colombian marimbula and of course the kalimba).

Ethnomusicology has been my passion since I was ten years old and received my first exposure to Gamelan, but I don't have a degree in it so it is simply a hobby that I put a LOT of research time into. I am not an expert.

For what is worth, and as a FYI to the OP>

I'm practically positive it should be "timbales", not "timbale".
In some countries, people speak Spanish by omitting the "s" at the end of words (like in Venezuela), but they do write their esses.

So,
You have 1 timbal
You have more than 1 timbales.

Having said that, I used Superior Drummer's Latin package extensively for a project a few months ago. I liked it, and I felt adequately covered for said needs.

I will look into BFD´s latin stuff next time I need some more (thank you for your reviews, Mark).

I spent most of Sunday making final decisions about how I am going to use BFD3 going forward, in terms of mono vs. stereo, ambience mic policies, etc.

This mostly affected my drum set presets, but I did end up making some minor tweaks to how I deal with various categories of percussion as well.

If anyone wants copies of my BFD3 presets, let me know. I save the key maps, kits, BFD3 level presets, and AU level presets for each kit that I design. I am too lazy to save tweaked kit pieces individually, and also doubt I would use the same tweaks in different kit contexts anyway.

The EZD kit is pretty nice, but I'd bet if they'd bothered to do one for Superior that it would in some cases excel fxpansion's offerings.

Nevertheless, I must also point out that BFD Percussion earns its keep with its excellent water phones, thunder sheets, and extremely extensive collection of effects percussion and hand percussion of all types.

It is too bad that they didn't provide a consistent same-brand trio of congas; much less a quartet or quintet of same. No one else does either. Most modern conga players use at least three. I compensate for this by making greater use of articulations on the two Gon Bop congas (the Meinl congas aren't as good, but that's the only tumbadora in BFD!).

Curiously, there are a few other timbales in my BFD layout, but Version 3 is a step back on many levels as it is no longer easy to identify the collection that an individual kit piece comes from. You can browse by collection, but that takes longer and isn't the point of view where I care about a kit piece's contributor. Anyway, I don't know which library they're from.

As it turns out though, the ones in BFD Percussion have now been identified as being Slingerland circa 1960, when they were still a very good source.

As there is no mention of Evolution Series World Percussion in this thread,I will add this as another possibility.
They have a South America volume,the demos aren't the greatest but the
libraries are actually beautifully sampled.

http://evolutionseries.com/?page_id=4530

carry on......

"If anyone wants copies of my BFD3 presets, let me know. I save the key maps, kits, BFD3 level presets, and AU level presets for each kit that I design."

I just placed an order for a BFD percussion package. If you're willing to share presets, please do.

Much appreciated! Thanks!

Evolution is a big and expensive series, and as there are other products with the same name from other vendors, I have remained confused whenever I hear it mentioned. At any rate, I didn't know they have finally gotten around to South America.

I may give those libraries a listen soon, but I also figured some or all of them might become part of NI Komplete at some point.

One that I didn't mention is escaping me at this late hour but is a well-known vendor who started with a two-volume orchestral percussion library originally for GigaStudio. Their general percussion library that includes latin stuff gets bad reviews and sounds very coarse and low res from demos.

I may start another topic on Best Practices for BFD -- especially as BFD3 is so different from BFD2, and as it drops some important features but adds new ones, and yet still appears way more professional than any other drum program available today.

This would be for MIDI rendering vs. live (as in gigs vs. as in real-time) playing via drum triggers and e-drums (Roland, Yamaha, Alesis, etc.). The considerations are EXTREMELY different, and BFD is definitely geared more towards live drummers than the other drum programs are.

mhschmieder wrote:Evolution is a big and expensive series, and as there are other products with the same name from other vendors, I have remained confused whenever I hear it mentioned. At any rate, I didn't know they have finally gotten around to South America.

I may give those libraries a listen soon, but I also figured some or all of them might become part of NI Komplete at some point.

One that I didn't mention is escaping me at this late hour but is a well-known vendor who started with a two-volume orchestral percussion library originally for GigaStudio. Their general percussion library that includes latin stuff gets bad reviews and sounds very coarse and low res from demos.

As far as I know none of this companies products have ever been in NI's Komplete line,yeah the name is a bit "generic" I have confused it with Orange Trees Evolution Guitars once or twice,lol
Yes at list prices there offerings are pricey but very nice,they are well sampled imho and they have a different approach than most other sampled percussion vendors.
The World Percussion line has been out for about a year and a half,it consists of Core,Africa,Asia,Europe,Middle East and South America which are sold separately or as a bundle.
BTW they have sales 2 or 3 times a year for about 35% off,recently they also added separate Djembie and Taiko libraries.

http://evolutionseries.com/

http://evolutionseries.com/?page_id=4488

mhschmieder wrote:I may start another topic on Best Practices for BFD -- especially as BFD3 is so different from BFD2, and as it drops some important features but adds new ones, and yet still appears way more professional than any other drum program available today.

This would be for MIDI rendering vs. live (as in gigs vs. as in real-time) playing via drum triggers and e-drums (Roland, Yamaha, Alesis, etc.). The considerations are EXTREMELY different, and BFD is definitely geared more towards live drummers than the other drum programs are.

That would be great. Something to be aware of is the General MIDI keymap as supplied is wrong on many assignments. I brought that up on the fxpansion forums and it was acknowledged as so but they're not going to put any time into fixing it.

Oh, I see that I was additionally getting confused by the similarly-named "Evolve" series, which indeed IS part of NI Komplete.

This is why the series keeps falling off my radar, and I think I also just missed a big sale.

Oh yes, I may have mentioned earlier that BFD's GM map is incorrect, and that the BFD1.5 and BFD2 maps are closer to GM than the GM map! The BFD3 map is infuriating in that much of it is change for change's sake (although partly it accommodates extensions) and thus harder to transition to, if one starts a project with a quick-and-dirty pre-packaged kit before splitting drum notes.

Ironically the free Sennheiser kit for Kontakt provides a BFD-compatible map that isn't. But it's pretty close so can be a good way of auditioning jazz drums before picking a better kit. WAY off topic at this point; sorry!

OK, I've listened to the Evolution South America audio demos and do not like them at all. Very unhappy with their miking choices and probably also the instrument sources. It's nice that they have a quartet on congas but I wonder at the brand? Or maybe bad heads and/or tuning?

That library is pretty exclusively Brasilian stuff, which is harder to find, of course, but I also find it difficult to work with most Brasilian percussion as so much of it is designed for outdoor festivals and thus can be hard to mix with "chamber" instruments and groupings.

As I said initially the demos are not very good but the libraries are well recorded.......

Although I went back to edit ALL of my posts to change the singular form to "timbal" vs. "timbale" (and yes, I know the comment was directed at the O.P. due to the topic title), I had deliberately used what I thought was the correct English (vs. Spanish) term for singular because a "timbal" is an ambiguous term that can refer to MANY so-called "kettle drums", and even including conga-like percussion such as Timbau (aka Brasilian Timbal).

Confusingly, Vir2 World Impact offers many variants of their percussion using different colloquial terms -- perhaps as a way of identifying their locale. So I opened it up to see why they have Timbau, Timbal, Timbal Bell, Timbales, and a few other potentially equivalent terms.

Unfortunately, there is no manual such as what came with Ethno World, so I can only guess by listening as the GUI doesn't change per instrument either (as it does for Ethno World).

The Timbal Bell sounds like a very dry mid-sized cowbell, such as one might mount with timbales or use mounted or hand-held with a single hand drum.

The Timbau sounds a bit like a narrow frame (small radius, and tall) higher-pitched Ashiko, as it has two distinct tones for the edge and the center (my guess from playing it, and from looking at various Brasilian made instruments going by this name). The opposite of a djembe sound; the other tone is quite loud and high-pitched.

The Timbal is most certainly not a single from a Timbales set, and more likely a Caribbean version of the Timbau (as Wiki would also indicate), but missing the high-pitched hard-slap sound of the Timbau and thus only having deep tones of varying pitch.

As for Evolution Series: South America, it's only $100 so I may buy it after all. I got confused earlier thinking each element was $500 vs. the entire suite.

Looks like the most recent Evolution Series sale ended on 8 December and was up to 40% off.

Sound-on-Sound reviewed the library in August 2011, and admired the seven mic positions and recording quality but complained that Yellow Tools Engine doesn't allow for instrument tuning and that the vendor provided zero information about the instruments sampled. It has since been ported to Kontakt though, so maybe the current version allows tuning (although it now only has four mics vs. the original seven).

Note, however, that the Evolution Series set is completely duplicated by elements in the new Brasilian kit from Sonokinetic and the Samba kit from Wavesfactory, which were both released at the end of 2015. I own both.

Having just re-tried them both just now, I'd say Samba Drums from Wavesfactory is the better kit -- though there is only partial overlap. This is due to how it was recorded, and also it seems more deeply sampled (though neither kit is as deep as Evolution Series).

Percussao do Brasil from Sonokinetic has two mic options (Close and Far), both of which sound too dark, muddy, and reverberant even if I remove the Impulse Response reverb effect. It sounds coarsely recorded also.

Note that Sonokinetic calls their Brasilian Timbau a Timbal; whereas both Wavesfactory and Evolution Series calls theirs a Timba. From what I can tell, Timba is the English form, Timbal the Spanish, and Timbau the Portuguese. And of course, no relation at all to Timbales!