How does the Macro feature work? It’s been in BFD3 forever. I don’t see it described in the manual. I’ve never been able to figure out how to make it do anything. Looks like it could possibly be useful for some kind of performance automation.
I keep thinking I should use them more and I hope one day I’ll get the hang of them as I thought they had real potential at the time.
Here’s a brief guide from Drew
Steve
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Cool. That’s what I was looking for. I was thinking it could be used to change the dampening and ambient ratios to make a master ‘tightness’ control. Also, to control that new transient design feature to set a master stick tone on cymbals. Automating just a little of that could go a long way during mixdown.
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Now - this is a cool feature that I need to dive into more.
Just watching that video above is giving a few ideas of how quick and easy it would be to increase ambience or punch at various points in a song without lots of automation within the DAW.
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I’ve made some presets using the macros that do just what I described. So, you can have one for tightness, another for pitch/depth, another for stick tone, and another for ambience/space. It’s not hard at all once you get the hang of it.
Macros enables me to make tweaks that are overall much more subtle and coordinated than if I were turning each and every knob individually. I can make optimizing decisions about how I want the whole kit to sound, and just nail the one coordinated group of settings that works best for the mix. Or even, for just a section of a song. It can be used quite subtly, but effectively. It really is a huge feature.
Can you post your macros settings file, or wherever it’s stored? I just haven’t had time to delve into this yet. I probably should watch Drew’s examples again.
Yeah, I’ll post some presets later in the week. It’s pretty neat.
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I’ve been testing this with macOS Monterey and can confirm it’s working as smooth as silk, following Drews video is a breeze, this is powerful stuff indeed and what a time saver this is. there’s a ton of scenarios these macro’s can be applied to, I totalyl recommend following the steps in the video, you will love it.
hooked on BFD macros 
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Hi Drew,
Is it possible to save the actual Macros that has been created as a preset on it’s own? So that it can be loaded onto another kit? I know that is probably a long shot as each kit has it’s own config and own effects and so forth, if this is possible please point me there, or am I asking for too much haha? As far as I can see, it can only be saved with the kit it has been created for as a full preset, so when I load the preset it recalls the entire kit and all of it’s assigned effects.
If I shared the preset I have created and I used a kit that another user does not have, it obviously wouldn’t work for them?
So a generic macros presets function or something, that could be saved as macros only and have global functions that can be transferred to any expansion/kit?
So:
Macros1 - reverb
Macros2 - EQ
Macros3 - Compression
Macross 4 - Effects/Dynamics
@deangersmith If you save it as a BFD Preset (not kit) and then load another kit on top of that Preset, the Macros should remain? Just thinking out loud.
I did save it as a preset. Unless I’m missing something?
I misread what you wrote. I thought you were just saving the kit only.
No probs, yes I can’t see a feature anywhere to save a macros preset on its own. Without it being attached to anything else.
It’s not currently possible no. But I have some ideas about that for BFD4.
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Bring back mixer presets, with macros.
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