Drum plugin: BFD of Battery 2? Can't mix with it though - need to export the WAV's

mcballs · 15th August 2005

I'd like to get your thoughts on which of these drum modules is best for my needs. Currently I have an Alesis QSR which leaves a lot of good drum sounds to be desired. I use only accoustic kits, and want them to sound as real as possible (ideally, even some musicians/engineers wouldn't know the difference). I have used Battery 1 in the past, and it was good, but didn't get that much time with it. Probably the most important consideration is this: where I will be mixing my stuff, I will not have access to whatever I decide to get. Therefore I will need to export all individual tracks, room mic tracks, etc, all to seperate WAV files to bring to the mixing studio. Since I've never used BFD, and haven't used much of Battery, and none of Battery 2, I'm not sure how they work in terms of the room mics, etc. Can these be seperated as well? I would need to get the individual drum mic tracks, as well as the room/overhead mics with all drums hitting. What about bleed... for example, hearing a bit of hi hat in the snare mic? This turned into a rant, sorry.

Let me know your thoughts. Cheers to all

McBalls

ketz · 15th August 2005

BFD is IMO whole different league than Battery. It has a bleed control; OH, PZM and room channels are separated (you can bounce them as separate stereo wavs), and the samples are just stunning. Of course it is all about acoustic drums (apart from 8 Bit Kit expansion pack) just make sure you have XFL expansion pack as well. What the BFD hasn't mastered yet is hihat control. Thats where Drumkit From Hell Superior kicks its ass. DFHS is acoustic drums plugin as well, with room, bleeds, OH's..and superb samples - it just has slightly less kits to choose from but with Custom & Vintage expansion pack it becomes really SLIGHTLY.

mcballs · 15th August 2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by ketz

BFD is IMO whole different league than Battery. It has a bleed control; OH, PZM and room channels are separated (you can bounce them as separate stereo wavs), and the samples are just stunning. Of course it is all about acoustic drums (apart from 8 Bit Kit expansion pack) just make sure you have XFL expansion pack as well. What the BFD hasn't mastered yet is hihat control. Thats where Drumkit From Hell Superior kicks its ass. DFHS is acoustic drums plugin as well, with room, bleeds, OH's..and superb samples - it just has slightly less kits to choose from but with Custom & Vintage expansion pack it becomes really SLIGHTLY.

Are you recomending DFH over BFD in general, or just for the Hi Hat's? Would you prefer to use BFD for the drums, and DFH for the hats, or all DFH?

THanks.

TheSweetener · 15th August 2005

The Linplug RMIV is alos quite nice. Not as specialized as the BFD, but with cool multisampled kits!

Earl Slick · 15th August 2005

I've used BFD a little bit, and like it a lot. I don't really have a whole lot of use for it, but it is great. The otherday i was at a friend's house listening to mixes he had used it on. The results were stunning. It sounded really natural. For many applications, I think it would be very difficult to tell the difference between BFD and real drums, if you are really good with BFD.

Bart

BB Bill · 15th August 2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcballs

Are you recomending DFH over BFD in general, or just for the Hi Hat's? Would you prefer to use BFD for the drums, and DFH for the hats, or all DFH?

THanks.

I do a lot of drum programming, and I own both DFHS and BFD. BFD is good, but IMO DFHS is definitely better. The bleed control, the interface and the samples themselves are just better in DFHS.

BFD has a couple of good snares, and it also has the ultra detailed hats - but I still end up using the hat from DFHS. If I use BFD at all it is for the odd snare drum.

As for Battery, it's just not in the same league as these two, as it is just a regular sample player (although a good one).

YMMV.

BBB

ketz · 16th August 2005

Quote:

Originally Posted by mcballs

Are you recomending DFH over BFD in general, or just for the Hi Hat's? Would you prefer to use BFD for the drums, and DFH for the hats, or all DFH?

THanks.

Thats really what I do - BFD for drums and DFHS for hats (sometimes rides and percussions). But thats because I first got BFD and became familiar with kits and found the sounds I really wanted for my project. Then, when I realized that hats were unusable most of the time (due to their bad programming, samples are great) I jumped for DFHS to fill the gap. Point is, I only browsed through DFHS drum sounds, they are awesome, it's just I've used them scarcely. Quite sure I'd be able to pull all of the sounds just from DFHS if I had got the time.

mcballs · 2nd September 2005

I bought BFD... it was available locally whereas DFHS was not, and I liked the idea of it being easier to use.

I can say it's definately an enormous step up from Battery 1. I am a little dissapointed with the samples, though. From that observation and all of your comments, I think I need to get the XFL expansion kit. Would you say that is manditory? The standard BFD doesn't have a snare that I love (although, it's got a few that I like quite a bit). What do you think?

Thanks!

CaliTone · 2nd September 2005

I wouldn't say that the samples in BFD are useless. I did an entire album with just BFD for drums and it sounds freakin' killer. I also have DFHS which is awesome as well. These two programs are in my opinion the best thing that ever happened to project studios. Before you needed to rent a killer room, have a great kit and drummer, and a nice mic collection to achieve a great sounding drum track. Not anymore! thumbsup

SHIRK · 2nd September 2005

FWIW: I recently purchased BFD and am having loads of trouble getting it to work. It's a demanding plug-in to say the least. I bought an extra internal SATA drive to stream the drum samples from....and I'm still having problems. Been told by a few I need more RAM...my 2.5GB isn't enough. Need another 2GB or so? I'm running a ProTools HD3 machine on a G5 Dual 2.5Ghz. I'm a little frustrated. Working with their tech support trying to get it fixed. The guys on the fxpansion forum pretty much gave up on me I think...haven't responded tot my posts for 3 days now. Angus has been helping me out through the DUC as of late. We'll see where we get. BFD is a cool program. Once I get it working properly I think I'll grab the XFL upgrade. Heard it sounds tastey.

max cooper · 2nd September 2005

I have BFD, XFL and the 8-Bit kit. Works great. If I want it to sound like a real drumkit, I mic up a real hi hat as well. Sometimes I use it to stack drum sounds on top of real drum sounds. It's system hungry, but I run it all the time without too much trouble.

CaliTone · 2nd September 2005

You don't need 4GB of ram in order for it to work properly. Do you have the lastest version. I remember when I bought BFD it was buggy as hell until I installed the updates. I'm running BFD VERY smoothly on a G4 Dual 1.25ghz with 2GB of ram. I've had no problems.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SHIRK

FWIW: I recently purchased BFD and am having loads of trouble getting it to work. It's a demanding plug-in to say the least. I bought an extra internal SATA drive to stream the drum samples from....and I'm still having problems. Been told by a few I need more RAM...my 2.5GB isn't enough. Need another 2GB or so? I'm running a ProTools HD3 machine on a G5 Dual 2.5Ghz. I'm a little frustrated. Working with their tech support trying to get it fixed. The guys on the fxpansion forum pretty much gave up on me I think...haven't responded tot my posts for 3 days now. Angus has been helping me out through the DUC as of late. We'll see where we get. BFD is a cool program. Once I get it working properly I think I'll grab the XFL upgrade. Heard it sounds tastey.

mcballs · 2nd September 2005

My system cracks and pops a bit now, which is driving me insane - but I only have 1GB of RAM - plan on getting another GB ASAP.

As for the samples, the BFD basic ones are good... I like the ludwig kit and am using one of the extra snares - another ludwig one I think. Is the expansion worth it, though? I find the snares all a little to dark - maybe I just need to EQ the balls out of it or something, but I try to avoid that.

max cooper · 2nd September 2005

I get what you're saying about the snares in BFD. I think I use no.4 for everything, or if I need something that's not metal, I use no.5. What got me is that I really love a nicely tuned Black Beauty, but I almost never use the BFD Black Beauty.

The thing about the XFL is that the number of different drums doesn't increase as exponentially as you would think. It seems like it's only a little more than double. I think there's expanded velocity layers and stuff, though, which makes it 22 Gigs.

My biggest request would be a set of drums recorded in a space that's not so 'live'. It's nice to hear, but if you're like me and you want to use mostly OH/room mics, it can get pretty raucous, especially if you apply 12:1 on an 1176.

The thing that makes BFD sound real to me is to run it through hardware compression.

usamike · 3rd September 2005

I've been using BFD constantly for about 6 months now and it's just great. I print all the tracks and mix them as I would a live kit. I even had a friend who is an awesome drummer ask me who played drums on one of my song demos- he was pretty heartbroken to find out it was fake.

-Mike

cletus · 3rd September 2005

Nice to hear all of this as I was recently watching a friend work with BFD and it sounded great! Next best thing to having a real drummer IMO. Another on my long list of plug ins for sure! I think it would be much easier to use with a midi controller but I'm a more hands on guy.

Yoni · 3rd September 2005

One other really cool feature of BFD which I think gets overlooked is the grooves that come with it (and the many more available for free download once you register.)

These grooves sound amazingly real and come with many variations and fills for each style, of which there are many versions (i.e - hip-hop 1a, 1b, 2, etc.) Really great for coming up with ideas but you can also use them for pre-existing songs (BFD has a sync to song feature.)

Find the 2-3 main styles that work for what your doing and then go through all the variations and fills to put together your track. Then go and edit to fit your song perfectly. You end up with a professionally played drum track suited exactly to your song.

I know this reads like ad copy but BFD really has improved my programmed drum tracks tremendously. I also recommend the 8-bit kit if you're into that.

DAWgEAR · 3rd September 2005

I own BFD + XFL and DFHS. I greatly prefer BFD: the samples sound better and it's more intuitive to use, plus great support from fxpansion.

15th August 2005	#1
mcballs Gear addict Joined: Jul 2005 Location: Canada Posts: 377 Thread Starter	Drum plugin: BFD of Battery 2? Can't mix with it though - need to export the WAV's I'd like to get your thoughts on which of these drum modules is best for my needs. Currently I have an Alesis QSR which leaves a lot of good drum sounds to be desired. I use only accoustic kits, and want them to sound as real as possible (ideally, even some musicians/engineers wouldn't know the difference). I have used Battery 1 in the past, and it was good, but didn't get that much time with it. Probably the most important consideration is this: where I will be mixing my stuff, I will not have access to whatever I decide to get. Therefore I will need to export all individual tracks, room mic tracks, etc, all to seperate WAV files to bring to the mixing studio. Since I've never used BFD, and haven't used much of Battery, and none of Battery 2, I'm not sure how they work in terms of the room mics, etc. Can these be seperated as well? I would need to get the individual drum mic tracks, as well as the room/overhead mics with all drums hitting. What about bleed... for example, hearing a bit of hi hat in the snare mic? This turned into a rant, sorry. Let me know your thoughts. Cheers to all McBalls

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15th August 2005	#2
ketz Gear Head Joined: May 2005 Location: Amsterdam Posts: 40	BFD is IMO whole different league than Battery. It has a bleed control; OH, PZM and room channels are separated (you can bounce them as separate stereo wavs), and the samples are just stunning. Of course it is all about acoustic drums (apart from 8 Bit Kit expansion pack) just make sure you have XFL expansion pack as well. What the BFD hasn't mastered yet is hihat control. Thats where Drumkit From Hell Superior kicks its ass. DFHS is acoustic drums plugin as well, with room, bleeds, OH's..and superb samples - it just has slightly less kits to choose from but with Custom & Vintage expansion pack it becomes really SLIGHTLY.

15th August 2005	#4
TheSweetener Lives for gear Joined: Dec 2004 Location: Germany / Frankfurt Posts: 1,215	The Linplug RMIV is alos quite nice. Not as specialized as the BFD, but with cool multisampled kits!

15th August 2005	#5
Earl Slick Gear Head Joined: Jul 2005 Posts: 30	I've used BFD a little bit, and like it a lot. I don't really have a whole lot of use for it, but it is great. The otherday i was at a friend's house listening to mixes he had used it on. The results were stunning. It sounded really natural. For many applications, I think it would be very difficult to tell the difference between BFD and real drums, if you are really good with BFD. Bart

2nd September 2005	#8
mcballs Gear addict Joined: Jul 2005 Location: Canada Posts: 377 Thread Starter	I bought BFD... it was available locally whereas DFHS was not, and I liked the idea of it being easier to use. I can say it's definately an enormous step up from Battery 1. I am a little dissapointed with the samples, though. From that observation and all of your comments, I think I need to get the XFL expansion kit. Would you say that is manditory? The standard BFD doesn't have a snare that I love (although, it's got a few that I like quite a bit). What do you think? Thanks!

2nd September 2005	#9
CaliTone Lives for gear Joined: Aug 2005 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 547	I wouldn't say that the samples in BFD are useless. I did an entire album with just BFD for drums and it sounds freakin' killer. I also have DFHS which is awesome as well. These two programs are in my opinion the best thing that ever happened to project studios. Before you needed to rent a killer room, have a great kit and drummer, and a nice mic collection to achieve a great sounding drum track. Not anymore! thumbsup

2nd September 2005	#10
SHIRK Gear addict Joined: Nov 2004 Location: Chicago Posts: 359	FWIW: I recently purchased BFD and am having loads of trouble getting it to work. It's a demanding plug-in to say the least. I bought an extra internal SATA drive to stream the drum samples from....and I'm still having problems. Been told by a few I need more RAM...my 2.5GB isn't enough. Need another 2GB or so? I'm running a ProTools HD3 machine on a G5 Dual 2.5Ghz. I'm a little frustrated. Working with their tech support trying to get it fixed. The guys on the fxpansion forum pretty much gave up on me I think...haven't responded tot my posts for 3 days now. Angus has been helping me out through the DUC as of late. We'll see where we get. BFD is a cool program. Once I get it working properly I think I'll grab the XFL upgrade. Heard it sounds tastey.

2nd September 2005	#11
max cooper Lives for gear Joined: Aug 2004 Location: tx Posts: 8,802	I have BFD, XFL and the 8-Bit kit. Works great. If I want it to sound like a real drumkit, I mic up a real hi hat as well. Sometimes I use it to stack drum sounds on top of real drum sounds. It's system hungry, but I run it all the time without too much trouble.

3rd September 2005	#15
usamike Gear addict Joined: Apr 2005 Location: LA Posts: 479	I've been using BFD constantly for about 6 months now and it's just great. I print all the tracks and mix them as I would a live kit. I even had a friend who is an awesome drummer ask me who played drums on one of my song demos- he was pretty heartbroken to find out it was fake. -Mike

3rd September 2005	#16
cletus Gear addict Joined: May 2005 Location: Bay Area Posts: 406	Nice to hear all of this as I was recently watching a friend work with BFD and it sounded great! Next best thing to having a real drummer IMO. Another on my long list of plug ins for sure! I think it would be much easier to use with a midi controller but I'm a more hands on guy.

3rd September 2005	#17
Yoni Gear nut Joined: May 2005 Posts: 126	One other really cool feature of BFD which I think gets overlooked is the grooves that come with it (and the many more available for free download once you register.) These grooves sound amazingly real and come with many variations and fills for each style, of which there are many versions (i.e - hip-hop 1a, 1b, 2, etc.) Really great for coming up with ideas but you can also use them for pre-existing songs (BFD has a sync to song feature.) Find the 2-3 main styles that work for what your doing and then go through all the variations and fills to put together your track. Then go and edit to fit your song perfectly. You end up with a professionally played drum track suited exactly to your song. I know this reads like ad copy but BFD really has improved my programmed drum tracks tremendously. I also recommend the 8-bit kit if you're into that.

3rd September 2005	#18
DAWgEAR Lives for gear Joined: Jul 2004 Location: Southern California Posts: 1,174	I own BFD + XFL and DFHS. I greatly prefer BFD: the samples sound better and it's more intuitive to use, plus great support from fxpansion.