Sorry I spent the money… Jazz Maple presets sound incredibly bad. Velocity on toms is all over the place and the harder you hit, they start to choke or rim shot. Ride is completely damped on bow, bell and edge?!?
NONE of the presets are usable and don’t sound like the referenced artists AT ALL!
Anyone with some insights on how to fix, I’m all (sore) ears.
Thanks!
(this should be in the Bugs category but I wasn’t allowed in for some reason).
Sadly, a lot of the presets in general aren’t that great. Take into consideration that most of the expansions and presets are over a decade old and the built-in FX while useable, fall flat by todays plugin processing and aside from the AIR modules, I don’t think they’ve been updated.
I don’t have this expansion, but the only thing I can suggest (and what I do) is to load up the kit itself without FX. Go through each kit piece and ambient channel and see what isn’t right. Then see if any of the tweaks on the Tech and Model tabs can help fix problems. There are a lot of tools there that can sometimes help.
I try and get the dry kit sound as good as it can possibly be, first. Sometimes send levels to ambient channels need to be adjusted, as some may be louder or quieter than others. If a particular articulation for a kit piece is varying in volume, you can adjust that. The dampening feature is very useful to tighten up sounds. Once the dry kit is sounding the way you want, then you can try adding FX. There are presets in each effect as starting points.
I think a lot of BFD users choose it, solely because of the quality of the dry sounds and if they’re an eKit player, just use the kits dry. Others like me, bring the dry kit into the DAW via multi-channel, print audio and use our own plugins to mix it.
Noticed the Ride issue. But it’s an easy fix, just go to the tweaks tab for the Ride and reduce the damping as it’s set rather high by default on the Jazz Maple presets.
I view presets as a suitable starting point but usually end up tweaking them to taste.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply and the tips! BFD team should really go back and fix these presets before selling. I’m guessing a lot of time has been and is being spent on Alesis modules and getting those right. If I bought a Stratus kit or other with BFD presets and they sounded like the expansions, I’d be rather pissed.
I have SD3 and EZD3 and those, of course, work right out of the box. Smooth, even velocities around the drums and cymbals. I guess you get what you pay for. Wasn’t aware I was buying into a construction kit (so-to-speak) with BFD3.
My approach with BFD3 (after hearing some to the aforementioned problems) has been to make my own presets as “Rooms” (see attached) and load kits into the rooms. Works for me but I’d rather be a playing drummer rather than an engineer.
Thanks again for chiming in, I’ll try your approach as well.
