BFD + Steve Albini expansion pack

[max cooper]

This has been more or less leaked for a while, but here's yer official release notes page:

http://www.fxpansion.com/product-deluxe-main.php

55 gigs worth of drum sounds. fxpansion online store says it's yours for the low, low price of $249 USD (wow, that is kinda low!)

[theother]

Can't wait to get mine. Already placed an order!

Seems to be good value for money as usual. I just love BFD!

[toolskid]

after spending many hours at Fxpansion checking out this pack I can truely say it ROCKS...awesome, really really detailed, really fun too!!

[Absolute]

I know it would be a hassle..but when is someone gonna do these drum samples to Tape?

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by Absolute

I know it would be a hassle..but when is someone gonna do these drum samples to Tape?

This one certainly would have been a good opportunity, huh? How much of a hassle would it really be, anyway?

[Jorg]

Kontakt 2 Library has pianos recorded to tape!

The greatest thing is that when you hit the keys hard on the Kontakt 2 Piano, it drives into saturation (not too much though).
I think they're awesome and like u guys said:

Why isn't there more stuff (Drums, Bass, Brass.......) out there???

Its not too much hassle at all if you think about it!

[midiman123]

Originally Posted by theother

Can't wait to get mine. Already placed an order!

Seems to be good value for money as usual. I just love BFD!

Seems very ok...., but:

isn´t it very heavy on the cpu?
KK

[Absolute]

Originally Posted by max cooper

This one certainly would have been a good opportunity, huh? How much of a hassle would it really be, anyway?

I dont know..Im just thinking when you have tons of velocity layers to deal with you dont even have to chop them up in digital..you could just record the segments as is...with tape your adding some more steps and when your dealing with thousands of samples its going to take longer and cost much more--I guess thats why no one has done it with drums yet

and it would seem obvious, with all the digital people longing for drums on analog tape , that they would have done it already.

[3rd world order]

Originally Posted by midiman123

isn´t it very heavy on the cpu?

must be from the 127 velocity levels. i wonder if there's an easy way to pick 5 and port the sounds to an Akai S6000. that's probably what i'd do...

55GB is a lil excessive I think.. but what the hell? more is better than less.

EDIT: in the manual it states you can install 32, 64, or 128 velocity levels.. you also get control over room & ambience mics.. so each hit is a combo of quite a few samples.

[Jorg]

You could do it this way:

Set up the tape machine, record to tape and the outputs of the tape straight to your DAW! Then all it would be is another step in the recording chain.
If the tape machine is alligned correctly, then you'd get the desired (fixed though) amount of saturation on the louder samples.

[Ol' Betsey]

Are you being ironic or are you actually saying Albini DIDN'T use a tape machine?

R.

[Jorg]

Originally Posted by Ol' Betsey

Are you being ironic or are you actually saying Albini DIDN'T use a tape machine?

R.

I dont know how this sample library was made, but you are right!
Didn't he buy all the quantegy tape when they said they would close down.
He records everything always to tape, doesn't he?
So maybe there was a tape-machine in the chain??

Did he actually record it himself or was it just done in his studio?

[Dr.Wu]

What i dont get is why do they go through all these troubles recording the single hits with all those nuances when in the end the demosongs that show the samples in action sound totally unrealistic?

RU with me?
Dr.Wu

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by Jorg

Did he actually record it himself or was it just done in his studio?

From what I've read, I believe they said that Albini got the sounds happening, and the fxpansion guys sat around for a week and hit drums (the really boring part, 127 velocity layers worth!)

I think if they'd used tape, they'd have made a BIG point about it, and I haven't seen a mention of it.

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by 3rd world order

must be from the 127 velocity levels. i wonder if there's an easy way to pick 5 and port the sounds to an Akai S6000. that's probably what i'd do...

Right, but the cool thing about BFD is that you have control over the stereo room mics, the PZM's, the Overheads and the room mics all the way through to mixdown.

What I usually do if I'm experiencing a CPU peak is to reduce BFD to just a pair of overheads and a kick and snare (four tracks + one MIDI) so it's not too big of a deal. Sometimes a couple of stereo pairs and a couple of close mics are all that's necessary anyway.

Another thing to remember about BFD is that it's 44.1/24 (switchable to 16, which you can do until mixdown, where you can switch back to 44.1/24) so if you're running the session higher than 44.1, the upsampling sucks a LOT of CPU resources.

I noticed the 44.1 thing with my Digi 002 converters (especially if I switched to 16 bit), but when I started using the Rosetta, I stopped being aware of it.

Originally Posted by midiman123

Seems very ok...., but:

isn´t it very heavy on the cpu?
KK

BFD is a lot heavier on the RAM than on the CPU. BFD is actually why I have 6 Gigs of RAM. I've had BFD running with:

3 Stereo pairs (PZM, C12, U87) + kick in and out, snare, and two tom mics at 44.1/24 with the buffer set to 64 samples. I had a guitar and a bass track + a click track running as well.

So it's not so bad. The Arturia Moog Modular is a lot harder on the CPU. There are a bunch of posts on the fxpansion forum where people apparently have trouble getting BFD to run properly, but I think a lot of it's due to the fact that they really try to give you control over every parameter they can, so it's not like running a digirack EQ or something. I did have a couple of problems with it, but that was when it had just come out, and, too, I was using a dual 500mHz G4 with 1.5 G RAM.

Their support is good. I've always gotten really fast responses to email, even on weekends. The support forum is good too. But you'll have those people who scream that it's the worst product ever made, etc. But for cranking out demos when I can't budget to book a room, it's great. I've bought all the expansion packs so far, and I was actually about to buy DFHS (which can run through the BFD engine) just to have more options, but now I'll get the Albini thing instead.

You can also run the Scarbee Imperial drums thru BFD. The Scarbee kit doesn't give you any options as far as changing pieces of the kit, instead, their focus was on sampling one really good drumset to the hilt. Interesting...

[theother]

Originally Posted by midiman123

Seems very ok...., but:

isn´t it very heavy on the cpu?
KK

Not on mine. I run VST on a PC 3.6GHz system. BFD uses less then 5% on my CPU.

Where do you have this information from?

[3rd world order]

Originally Posted by max cooper

Another thing to remember about BFD is that it's 44.1/24 (switchable to 16, which you can do until mixdown, where you can switch back to 44.1/24) so if you're running the session higher than 44.1, the upsampling sucks a LOT of CPU resources.

I noticed the 44.1 thing with my Digi 002 converters (especially if I switched to 16 bit), but when I started using the Rosetta, I stopped being aware of it.

does this thing support re-wire?

are you running BFD on it's own machine or in parallel with protools?

i see what you mean about the room mics making it difficult to port to the akai... i'd very likely wanna process the heck out of em with my outboard racks anyhow... so i guess i'd just have to resample it all anyhow. no biggie.

[midiman123]

Originally Posted by theother

Not on mine. I run VST on a PC 3.6GHz system. BFD uses less then 5% on my CPU.

Where do you have this information from?

-From the inside of my head!!
He, he.. Seriously I´m just asking, cos´ I played around with Sampletank, and also another software sampler that was really heavy on the CPU.
I just assumed that this thing also was a CPU hog if you use alot of drums & perc like I do...

But if that´s not the case, like you say, I might just buy it if it sounds ok..

Right now I´m using Discrete Drums series two, and that also works fantastic...
KK

[theother]

Originally Posted by midiman123

-From the inside of my head!!
He, he.. Seriously I´m just asking, cos´ I played around with Sampletank, and also another software sampler that was really heavy on the CPU.
I just assumed that this thing also was a CPU hog if you use alot of drums & perc like I do...

But if that´s not the case, like you say, I might just buy it if it sounds ok..

Right now I´m using Discrete Drums series two, and that also works fantastic...
KK

I think it's more important to have a fast HD.

I use a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA just for BFD. But I'm sure less would work fine too.

[3rd world order]

Originally Posted by theother

I think it's more important to have a fast HD.

I use a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA just for BFD. But I'm sure less would work fine too.

western digital? yeeeeeeeee.. i've blown up 2 of em. NEVER AGAIN.

Seagate or IBM/Hitachi please.

[midiman123]

Originally Posted by 3rd world order

western digital? yeeeeeeeee.. i've blown up 2 of em. NEVER AGAIN.

Seagate or IBM/Hitachi please.

I was thinking the same thing like you, but I got a brand new external Seagate HD 7200rpm that acts a bit... "wierd"(?),
- and I often get the feeling it´s a bit to slow for some things...
Or maybe it´s just Pro Tools that´s got a problem with it...?

KK

[Absolute]

Originally Posted by max cooper

I think if they'd used tape, they'd have made a BIG point about it, and I haven't seen a mention of it.

Bingo..that was my thought..I could care less how much tape he bought..if you were the first drum samples on the market recorded to tape--they would be called Analog tape drum samples..e

If they are not tape, which I cant see how they could and not shoot off fireworks, it says a lot about what a hassle it must be considering the Albini equation

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by 3rd world order

does this thing support re-wire?

are you running BFD on it's own machine or in parallel with protools?

i see what you mean about the room mics making it difficult to port to the akai... i'd very likely wanna process the heck out of em with my outboard racks anyhow... so i guess i'd just have to resample it all anyhow. no biggie.

3WO:

Yeah, I use it in ReWire mode. I tried it as an RTAS plugin when (I think it was) 6.9 (PTLE) was released and it was cool, but due to the buffer sizes being designed for compressor and eq plugins, it was really hell on the ol' CPU.

As a ReWire device, it works great. As far as running BFD through outboard, I think that's key to really giving it some weight. I run four busses out of my Rosetta 800 when I mix so I can do just that. When you're mixing, you see BFD as if it were a drumkit, so whatever processing you can do with drums, you can do with BFD; I don't see why it doesn't make the most sense to hit 'em with the outboard at mixdown.

Unless you're going to 'print' the drums before the final mix, you can use aux tracks in PTLE instead of audio tracks, so the drag is even less. I've tried submixing the drums, but the drum mix is so affected by everything else, that I can't see how people can do it. Maybe they've done it a lot more than I have.

[Angus_FX]

Tape was not used.. Steve Duda's post here goes some way towards explaining that:-

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewto...light=#1430208

As such, tape doesn't really work in a one-shots context. It's not an impossible amount of hassle -- just record to tape, stream it back in to PT -- but it doesn't really offer as much benefit as one might think.

If you want some nice multi track drumloops recorded on tape, it's worth checking out these guys -> www.drumdrops.com. The fact that it's loops (similar in concept to Discrete Drums or Drumcore) means that the tape really gets to work its magic. I've no commercial association with them, just like the way the stuff sounds.

Essentially, Steve Albini directed the physical (drum tuning and setup, mic choice and placement...) and analog (light compression and eq, see Duda's post linked above) side of the recording, and Steve Duda looked after the digital side (a PT HD 192 system).

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by theother

I think it's more important to have a fast HD.

I use a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA just for BFD. But I'm sure less would work fine too.

But I'd say a lot of RAM is as important, if not more, since BFD has a 'load everything to RAM' mode.

[radiospace]

I was having a lot of problems with BFD when I first installed it. FX's tech support told me, when asked, that upgrading my RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB would be more beneficial than a better hard drive. After doing the RAM upgrade it's been working smoothly...

[Dr Gruv]

just ordered mine... should be fun :)

[Kenny Gioia]

For some reason:

The name "Steve Albini" and Sample Drum Library in the same sentence seems odd to me.

Coming up next:

Mutt Lange's 1 mic technique for recording drums.