Recording - July 2010 - 31

volume, you get a louder, brighter, or harsher sample than the one you’d get with a lighter touch. BFD can also be told to force changes in sample selection to avoid the “machine gun” effect when playing multiple hits on the same drum. How many articulations you get depends on the drum type. Toms have only one articulation; Percussion items offer one or two; Cymbals have Hit, Bell, and Edge; the Kick has hits with and without snare bleed; the Snare has Hit, Sidestick, Half-edge, Rim, and Drag; and there are up to 11 articulations for the HiHat, with varying amounts of openness, tip or shank strike, and pedal action. Not all articulations are available for all drums in all styles.

within the Kick channel you can blend mics from the beater side and back of the kick for “snap” vs. “boom”. In addition to those direct-miked samples, you can blend in the Overheads and Room, two stereo submixes that add ambience and realism to the kit sound when blended in appropriately. An engineer who’s used to delicately tweaking the relative miking levels of a dozen or more mics on a kit will want the full version of BFD, but for many users these two simple settings are plenty. They’re quick to implement, easy to understand, and lots of fun, because you can easily hear your changes with the touch of a fader. When in Channels mode, the upper part of the window lets you set up the sonic character of each drum—top vs. bottom snare

Snare Of Doom within about 30 seconds, all without cracking the manual. Sweet! ...and the Groove BFD Eco’s Grooves mode has a dropdown selector for a variety of MIDI grooves to play back your drum sounds once they’re tweaked (or while you’re tweaking them). You’re not limited to what the program gives you, of course; it’s easy to feed MIDI data from your DAW of choice and trigger the sounds in BFD that way, and you can quickly build key maps to control the kits the way you want to, with all the usual tricks like choke notes etc. Grooves are sorted by genre, time signature, BPM range, and grooves vs. fills; you can drag and drop your selections to the Drum Track timeline below the menus and build up and save entire song structures that way. Grooves can be moved, shortened, etc., just by dragging and dropping, and you can export them to your DAW for fine editing, but you can’t edit them event by event within BFD Eco. Simple controls are provided to loop playback, adjust the complexity of the MIDI data in a groove, alter the swing, and humanize the rhythm of the playback.

BFD Eco’s tabbed interface includes a signal path for putting effects on each drum (above) and a timeline for building MIDI grooves into songs (at right).
While there’s nowhere near as many drums to choose from as in the full version of BFD, you might still be daunted by the many choices you do have. There are several options within the “picker” popup to help you sort and find what you want; for example, you can sort by RAM load or number of available articulations, or set a “star rating” for your favorites so they’re easier to find. You can even press a button to go online and buy new drum sound expansion sets from the FXpansion website. Most BFD expansion sets, from FXpansion or third-party firms like Platinum Samples, are compatible with BFD Eco, although not all the samples’ articulations and miking options may be available. ...the Mix... Unlike the larger program, BFD Eco limits your miking choices to a set of basic but very useful options. Every Kit-Piece, of course, has its own direct channel in the mix; in addition, within the Snare channel you can blend top and bottom miking, and mic, for example, or how much of each piece’s signal is routed to the Overheads and Room busses. Each drum then has three optional insert effects: a 4-band parametric eq and two user-selectable inserts in series, each with its own parameters and graphic interface. There are 14 algorithms available, from simple gain adjustment to compressors, time delay effects, special effects like a bitcrusher and ring modulator, and a lovely plate reverb from Overloud’s BREVERB plug-in (reviewed February 2008). Once you have all your settings to your liking, the Kit-Piece can quickly be named and saved as a preset for future use. This was my favorite part of BFD Eco, because I’m such a freak for sound design; I took an ordinary snare, threw on some bass-heavy eq, lined up the plate reverb and a gate with appropriate settings, and had the Hugh Padgham/Phil Collins Gated Extras and final thoughts I haven’t even touched on the many little touches that help turn BFD Eco into a very full-featured drum creation setup, like adjustable mic bleed via a simple oneknob interface, MIDI Learn mode, an extensive key mapping utility, handy mixer features like mute, solo, and the two Aux buss routings for send/return processing and/or subgrouping, multiple audio channel support, and so forth. There’s a lot going on here! If you’re getting the impression that I really enjoyed BFD Eco, you’d be right. As I worked with the program, people kept stopping by my studio and borrowing my headphones to listen to the sounds and grooves I was whipping up, and more than one walked away saying, “That’s so much fun, I’ve got to get it for myself.” What more can I say?

Price: $149 ($99 after $50 instant rebate promotion good through July 31, 2010) More from: FXpansion, www.fxpansion.com
RECORDING JULY 2010

http://www.fxpansion.com

Recording - July 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2010