New to the forum and hoping it’s a user error thing.
When switching presets (with or without Kits selected), I’m getting serious velocity changes. Expect it somewhat when I have Mix selected but if I find a mic placement preset that I like and deselect Mix to try other kits in that “space”, I still get very pronounce changes in velocity. I checked the Master fader on quite a few Kits and they seem to hold steady.
Any insights from the forum would be appreciated.
1 Like
Maybe somebody with a better understanding will correct me, but my understanding is that the various BFD kits and expansions are in no way “normalized” for volume across samples, kits, etc. I believe the fluctuations you’re seeing should be expected.
Yeah, there is a lot of variability and inconsistency with levels and other attributes, amongst the various expansions. I’m not sure if you’re playing an eKit, or using grooves, but if the latter, it could just be that some grooves that come loaded with the presets have varying velocities. You can use the Dyn parameter in the Dashboard to globally affect all incoming MIDI, to make things louder, or softer.
Thanks Phileosophos,
Thanks for the feedback. So far switching kits after finding a present/mix I like seems as close as I’ll get to some level of consistency. It’s not a show-stopper, just frustrating.
Playing through a Roland TD-17 so will try the Dyn parameter. I have Addictive Drums 2.5, Logic Drum Kit Designer, Reason Drum Kits RE, Klevgrand Oneshot, SSDSample 5 and a couple other freebies. None have crash bow articulation?!? (who programs this stuff?), but all have consistent velocities throughout their various kits. Downloaded the trial version of EZDrummer 3 and it’s also very consistent (also the most responsive from a drummer’s perspective) so, with my budget, that and BFD3 are the only game in town.
Love the control with BFD3 but it looks like I’m in for making a lot of my own presets to wrangle the velocity issue. Will report back after I try your suggestion.
Thanks
Hi Fender_Bender,
Tried the Dyn thing and as you said, it does change the overall volume. The problem is still there…Choose a preset, deselect Kits and Mix, choose a few kits and there it is again. Wildly loud drums and barely audible cymbals or drastically different volumes from one cymbal to the next.
Got BFD3 on sale for cheap so not a great loss but I think it’s time to switch to EZDrummer 3 (or spend a boat-load of time fixing the kit inconsistencies in BFD3 one kit at a time).
Thanks again for chiming in!
Help me out here in my ignorance: what is a “crash bow articulation”? I ask in part because you’ll find different kits often have different articulations. Like I forget which expansion I bought (maybe “Vintage Recording Techniques”?) had a ton more articulations on some things than others. I also wonder if the “crash bow articulation” is like the trick I learned a while ago to do swells.
Hi Phileosophos,
Crash bow articulation is the tip of the stick on the bow as opposed to the shank of the stick on the edge (the crash articulation). Think the beginning of Donald Fagen’s I.G.Y. or SD’s Aja (many, many others). That tinkling sound. A lot of jazz drummer’s will use a left-side crash/ride or sizzle ride on the bow for a secondary ride sound. As I mentioned, the only drum apps/vsts in my price range (SuperiorDrummer 3… out of range for now) that have it are BFD3 and EZDrummer 3. Others are all one sound no matter where you hit the cymbal.
BFD3 has it on almost every stock kit but, as mention earlier, velocity discrepancies make it really hard to be nuanced. Ride is sometimes inaudible and the right or left crash will take your ears off.
Gotcha. First, thanks for the explanation. Second, it looks like I find that articulation in the crash cymbals in several of the expansions. The Jazz Noir, Cocktail, London Sessions, etc. all have it. Sounds like you could adjust a few things and get what you’re after, so I guess that’s good news.
Yes, they do but as I mentioned a couple times, BFD’s articulation are not the issue. The problem is that presets need tons of tweaking to get kits that don’t have wildly varying velocities between kit pieces. Every other plugin I use (Addictive Drums 2.5, Toontrack EZDrummer 3, Logic Drum Kit Designer, Reason Drum Kits RE, Klevgrand Oneshot, Steven Slate 5) don’t have this issue. Their velocities are all, pretty much mix-ready.
Maybe I’m not gettin the BFD3 ethos? My understanding is that Presets can have Kits, Mixes and Grooves along for the ride or you can choose a Preset/Mix you like, go to the Kits tab a open a Kit in that Preset/Mix?
Am I understanding this correctly?
Sorry, I think I was still hung up on the question of articulations because I was learning some things from you and the software along the way. I don’t think I’m a BFD3 expert, not by a long shot, but I’ve been using it long enough now that I feel like it’s “clicked” with me, and I get it. I still find new features from time to time (like how to do cymbal swells a while ago in one of these forum posts), but I think I’ve got a decent command of its capabilities and maybe a grasp of its ethos.
The short answer to your question is that it sounds like you grasp the fact that presets are the biggest conceptual item in BFD3. They’re the whole enchilada, which is why I tend to work with them and save them. And yes, you can then mix and match things into a preset when loading by toggling those filter buttons. That lets you load one preset but then the grooves and mixer from another, or the automation map from another, or the key map from another, or a different kit, etc. I think it’s a cool way of working insofar as you can build up your own kits as one piece of a preset along with all those other items, but then easily bring in just the mix or just the grooves or whatever from another.
The longer answer begins with me saying I haven’t used many drum presets, kits, etc. that seemed wildly all over the map to me, or maybe I’ve just saved enough of my own presets that I don’t notice it anymore. Let me pass on a couple of workflow items. First, what I do is rely on presets for everything I want, because as you can see from the little buttons at the top to choose what loads when you pick a new preset, you can selectively load (or exclude) the kit (i.e., drums and the drum editor stuff), the mixer setup, grooves (i.e., palette, drum track, and editor settings), key map, automation map, and global/session settings.
This suggests an approach to workflow that I’ve used and actually find rather fun. When I’m focusing on BFD3 being my source for drums, I’m either (1) playing around, or (2) working with a preset to serve a larger song/track in my DAW. The playing can happen with the standalone app (which is nice) or in my DAW (which is also nice and adds a few helpful bits), but the key is that I’m trying to come up with an overall drum sound featuring all those elements for some purpose. I usually pick a preset as a starting point, though I have sometimes begun with just a kit, and I swap out kit pieces until I have the overall drum kit that I want. I save a preset as a point of reference when I get there, and then I start tweaking: fiddling with the drum editor if needed, adjusting the mixer, applying/changing the effects to channels, adjusting bleed levels for realism, putting together a few grooves in a new palette to test/audition my changes easily, etc. And if the track is going to be driven by external MIDI (e.g., from my classic Roland R8 drum machine), then I make darn sure I have the right key map in place as well. Along the way, I’m saving presets until I have exactly what I want.
The result of that “play” is a final preset that I can reuse over and over in any track/project I wish. Or leverage as a starting point for more playing around. I make sure I back up my presets to an external NAS quite frequently because I don’t want to lose any of that work. So maybe that’s why I haven’t been as bothered by what you’re describing: I’ve dialed things in and largely been just using my creations as ready-to-go presets for projects. I think it’s certainly worth noting that you could use those loading filter buttons to do something similar but swap only the mixer settings, to load your different preferred ways to mix your overall output. I haven’t done this much because of the differences in numbers of kit pieces, layout, etc., but I can see how maybe that would help.
An alternate way of working, which I’ve tried and mostly rejected, would be to focus on using BFD3 only as the source for audio and not so much an overall drum engine. I think it’s pretty darn great as an engine, but even I tend to create and/or use external MIDI clips/devices from time to time, so I can see the value in keeping more of the data in your DAW, doing more of the mixing in your DAW, applying effects only in your DAW, etc. BFD3 facilitates this in a few different ways. I’ve used its multi-output ability on several projects. The great thing is that it supports up to 16 tracks if I recall correctly (though I do have a naming issue with my preferred Nuendo that I don’t have in other DAWs), so you can route channels nicely into your DAW, “freeze the audio” to conserve CPU cycles, and then do all your processing there.
I’ve also fiddled with BFD3’s export ability, which is pretty cool too. You can configure settings through the export panel and have it spit out a single stereo mix for your whole song, or individual audio channels that you can then import as audio tracks into your DAW. I tend to be that guy tweaking drum stuff all the way to the finish, so I don’t find this works as well for me. The main thing that keeps pushing me in that direction is that I find the groove editor and its tools to be nice but a little finicky/clunky at times. Maybe I’m just more accustomed to the Cubase/Nuendo drum-map way of working after so many years with it. But I think for your concern, the great thing would be that you could have a “template” of sixteen standardized tracks for your incoming drums and have all your mixer settings good to go right off the bat in your DAW. As long as you took a little time to save presets in BFD3 with levels you like, you could mix and match pretty easily.
1 Like
Thank you Phileosophos for taking the time to share your workflow philosophy. As chance would have it, I started tweaking some presets and going down the road of saving those as my start point, i.e., Find a preset I like, try a few kits with it then tweaking levels to get a consistent level throughout the kit pieces. I think this somewhat follows the approach in you spelled out.
I have no need for Grooves (other than for auditioning my tweaks) as I’ve been a pro-drummer all of my adult life. Even then, the final arbiter is getting behind my Roland kit and playing to make sure the response from the vst is as close as possible to sitting behind an acoustic kit. That’s why I appreciate the time other drum vst vendors have taken to produce “ready-for-mixing” VSTs/AUs. Of all that I own (see list in a couple of my replies), BFD3 is the only one that has some, what I would call, random mis-matches in velocities within a preset, mix or kit. Even my Virtual Peter Erskine presets have overly “hot” velocities on some of the cymbals.
For example, EZDrummer 3 plays every articulation - swells, stick tip-on-bow, left-hand snare drag, hi-hat close<open and splash, etc., exactly as if I were sitting down at an acoustic kit. Their map for the Roland TD-17KVX is spot-on, no remapping at all. For hi-hats and cymbal swells, BFD3 requires going to settings and adjusting to get it smooth… why weren’t they tuned in before shipping?!?
Finally, as I mentioned, I got BFD3 on sale with an add on coupon, so I’ll continue to work with it and develop a work-flow over time. But, from a drummer’s perspective, for getting it right from the start, it doesn’t hold a candle to EZDrummer 3.
Thanks again for taking the time!
Oh wow, that totally explains your sensitivity to those issues. I somehow missed that you’re a professional drummer using BFD3 as a sample library! Now your concerns make perfect sense. I could be wrong, but I’m betting your question contains its own answer: BFD3 isn’t polished the way it needs to be for you because that wasn’t the main focus of the software, maybe not even the second or third focus.
I think the thing I most like about BFD3 is its laser focus on its purpose. So many audio plugins or other tools these days seem to be trying to add irrelevant bits X, Y, or Z simply to fill out a marketing data sheet with all the right bullet points. For example, I find Steinberg’s Groove Agent pretty amazing with all its kits, agents, etc. and absolutely appreciate how good it can sound and how easy it is to accomplish certain things with it. But it feels to me like a complete conceptual mess by comparison, probably because they tried to make an all-in-one approach that satisfies folks who want old-school drum machine workflow, an attempt at a phrase-based real drummer, and then the percussion agent that smacks of old-school RMX or maybe the newer PercX way of working.
In contrast, everything about BFD3 seems to me aimed at making the ultimate all-in-one drum engine for pattern-based work. I think it’s great that it can be leveraged for your use case. I guess maybe I’ve arguably used it somewhat similarly when I worked out a key map for my Roland R8, so that I could replace the drum machine so old sequences play back nicely with BFD3 picking up the slack. But obviously what you’re after is a ton more sensitive to velocity layers, proper gradations and tuning, etc. That’s very cool that you can use it that way at all.
I’d be really curious to see what your opinion is of the software after you’ve used it for six months to a year or something, if you end up doing so. It took me a while just to figure out how to use the thing, I think because I was coming to it from Beatbox Anthology 2 and Groove Agent 5. But the more I use it, the more I appreciate all the wonderful little touches for getting a realistic sounding performance with comparably little effort. And maybe I’m biased, but I think the samples themselves are brilliantly recorded, and the technology around drum modelling and realism is wonderful.
Anyway, I’ll stop rambling. You’re welcome for the “help” if that’s what I’ve been. I hope it goes well for you. Feel free to come back and ask more anytime. I don’t think these forums are super active, but there are a lot of very helpful people here in my experience. Cheers!
1 Like
I think a lot of the volume variations boil down to personal taste. If BFD adjusted the presets to please me they would probably alienate lots of other people. As long as volume levels are in the ballpark I’m happy. I almost always find the toms loud and the closed highhats quiet.
I only use BFD for finger drumming with Maschine and so many individual volume discrepancies are easily accounted for with individual technique. Like most people, I have quite a few drum plugins, but I find the wide variety of drums sounds and the hyper-realism of BFD to be a winning combo. I keep coming back to it and I find myself looking forward to using. I really want to like Battery, but I usually end up telling myself, “You own it, so you should try to use it more often even though you don’t feel like it”. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t carry the same level of excitement. Ditto for Groove Agent and Addictive Drums. And given it’s spotty reputation, I have found BFD to be quite reliable and crash proof. Now, the time it takes to download an expansion pack is another story.
Hi ratskins,
Thanks for your perspective.
Mine is sitting at e-kit with headphone on. I think I mentioned earlier in this thread, BFD3 is the only virtual drums plugin that I have (and a have all the major ones) that has extreme swings in volume/velocities when playing through presets. But I’m in the process of create my own with settings that suit my needs. It’s a lot more work than other plugins, but I’ll persevere!
Thanks for chiming in!!
I just ran into kind of an extreme case of what you referred to regarding volume fluctuations from preset to preset. I see what you are saying! It’s kind of annoying, but not a deal killer.