Think I found the one you mean:
Super knowledgeable guy, RIP indeed.
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He’s such a funny dude and obviously a legend. I’ve been doing as he suggests, by bringing in the panning of the kit to 70-80% to make space on the sides for other elements and also bringing in the snare verb even tighter.
Interesting one on making sure the kick is hitting louder than the snare on the meters. I always feel like it’s the snare that gets lost in the mix, not the kick. Damn it… now I want these drums.
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Anyone get their license yet?
Been a week now, still waiting on mine.
The only thing missing from the Andy Johns kit is there’s no squeak in the kick drum pedal.
I never bothered switching my platinum samples licenses from my old account to my new one (BFD2->BFD3 era not inMusic) so I’m not sure how Jim Scott drums work in BFD3 but at least in BFD2 the snares needed the velocity->volume perameters tweaked to give a more realistic sense of variation in the volume between low and high velocities. Even though it’s recorded with an amazing amount of RRs the volume between samples isn’t enough. Without this they WILL sound machinegunny even with AMG turned on.
As for the rest, Andy John’s drums are amazing and very hifi, bright and “fancy” sounding, while my favorite are the Joe Barresi drums. All three of these have very deep sampling in terms of RRs and they can all sound completely authentic in or out of a mix, IMO the demos don’t do them justice.
Also another tweak I do when using PS drums (even helps BFD packs too) is altering the hihat fade parameter in the engine settings (to increase the fade time for the muting of open sounds). The most dead giveaway for samples is the instant muting/volume drop of hihats in the overheads/ambient mics, and in the case of some packs you hear it in the close mics too when doing more intricate hihat work.
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Barresi is definitely next on my list, will pick it up immediately if it goes on sale.
Nice tip on the fade parameters. I love that BFD even allows you to edit them, and it’s easy to miss because they’re tucked away in the preferences. The level of customisation and control has pleasantly surprised me several times.
The Platinum Kits are stellar as well as their groove packs. The Evil Joe B kit is ridiculously great. The Andy Johns kits as well. In short, I have most of the products and have not one complaint.
Rail is a busy man. It may take a minute but, worth the wait. He was a huge help a few years back as BFD changed hands from Roli to InMusic. He is a brilliant serious pro.
As a guitarist, hearing AJ speak about recording with JB is an incredibly cool opportunity. He gives a lot of insights into a. the kits b. specific suggestions & the collective of LZ the groups, focus, and attention to detail in creating ART, not a bunch of overly tweaky BS. The insights he shares echo a lot of what Jimmy Page speaks about when tracking guitars and his love of the, & subsequent practice of using, the room sound, multiple amps, and mic placement within the room to get the freaking goods. The AJ kits & presets are stellar capturing a no-nonsense ‘straight-up nailed-it’ mix. When you look at the mixer and effects used in the presets you may notice that there is zero fat, just the basics if ANY at all and they KILL. These kits & presets are truly legitimate environments that allow the curious recordists to go in & fart around and explore & implement recording techniques of the past. This dovetails with room ambience tools like UA’s Ocean Way Studios which also lets you explore ambient sound design on guitar amps, again like Jimmy Page used. Combine this with the BFD & Platinum resources and you are off to the races in your vintage lime green Ford Pinto hatchback. ¢3
I own Evil Drums for BFD and it’s one of the best libraries I’ve played with edrums, I purchased now the Jim Scott expansion and opened a support ticket but they refuse to give a serial number so I will contact Drew soon…
I got the serial from Drew, all good now
I know this is a bit old but…
I’ve got all three and personally I think they are still probably the best drum software available anywhere. I’ve never seen any company offer kits recorded with as many velocity layers as those packs and for triggering on edrums I feel like it makes a difference. Even the regular BFD stuff doesn’t measure up in my opinion. There are some pretty close but nothing with the consistency of PS.
I really hope whatever comes down the line from BFD…like a BFD4 or whatever, that they would go absolutely extreme with the velocity layers and top PS kits by having like 300+ layers or something ridiculous like that. Unfortunately I think it’s just not the market. I’m guessing the vast majority of BFD users are not like me. Acoustic drummers who now trigger via ekits and by far my biggest priority is “realness” when playing. Tricking my brain into thinking it’s a real kit when I close my eyes. With BFD London, Deluxe, and even some BFD3 kits, I feel like there are “gaps” in many of the kit pieces where there is not that subtle division of sounds to such a fine degree. PS pretty much all of them have such extreme detail that it really feels like playing a real drum. I think there are maybe one or two snares on all the PS packs where I think they didn’t record them to quite the same 256 velocity layer type numbers.
I think it’s probably just too time consuming, cost prohibitive, and most non drummers who use it probably don’t care. But I do. I’ve been waiting for any company to top them and I don’t think I’ve seen anything yet at that level. Not superior, or slate, or that modeled one…all the demos I’ve heard sound off somehow and the common denominator seems to me to be the velocity layers.
Do you have Dark Farm? That’s a highly detailed kit, especially the HH’s with the extra articulations. London and Deluxe are pretty old and back then, BFD didn’t have some of the articulations that most of the BFD3 expansions now have.
A 300+ layer library would be amazing!
I think you’re right though, too costly, too time consuming — the recording process is so mind-numbingly tedious that no-one has the patience for it, and I don’t blame them.
Have to admit, these days I use Superior most of the time because it’s more stable and consistent, but I’ve always prefered the sound of BFD/PS. The samples sound more “alive,” don’t know how else to describe it. The high end on the cymbals is also so much crisper and more realistic than any of the competition. Superior cymbals have a strange dullness to them.
Not to be too snarky or anything, but I got thinking about this and was wondering is it even possible to do anywhere near 300 layers? Just because a well trained ear can hear the difference in that many velocity layers, how would you get someone to consistently play with that tiny degree of difference in how hard they are hitting the cymbal or drum to record that in a way that would work? You’d have to use a calibrated machine to get that level of granularity in hits, I’d have thought. Or am I missing something?
I would think that it’s more practical to instead, just track the samples at a higher sample rate like 96kHz, rather than have a crazy amount of layers.
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Well…as mentioned…the Platinum Samples are recorded up to 256 velocity layers for a single kit piece so I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be. I think the point is to have as many different layers and there for samples in your round robins as you can. I’ll admit I don’t know the technical ins and outs about all of this but there has to be a reason why the PS kits just play SO much better than everything else on ekits.
Like just right now I was playing the Jazz Noir kits and they just don’t have the same feel. I’m constantly having to mess around with the Loudness section on the kit pieces to dial in the dynamics and curve cause they don’t play right when directly loaded. The camco snare for example just lacks fine detail when playing.
When one looks at the “spec sheets” for these packs the only real difference I see is the number of velocity layers.
No I haven’t tried that one. Articulations are good but that doesn’t mean detailed samples. How many velocity layers on that kit? Personally I’d rather have fewer articulations with more detailed samples/layers. Again…playing on edrums is my priority and having them not only sound like real drums but feel like them as well. I could be wrong but I don’t think sample rate has anything to do with level of detail of the actual recorded kit piece sounds.
What I have noticed is that with many new expansion packs from many companies, they don’t bother to even tell you how many velocity layers there are anymore. Like with all the BFD sample libraries on this site you can’t find that information. I suspect there is a reason for that.
You don’t need much more than 130 velocities to be honest. Adding more layers doesn’t always equate to better realism, and for a lot of people, the breadth of sound is more important - can’t tell you how many times we’ve been asked for the same snare at different tunings, that kind of thing.
Dark Farm took us 10 days to sample. It is really detailed, especially considering we added something like 8 additional closed to open states, which actually DOES really benefit e-kit playing. We could’ve gone further, but then you’d get fewer drums in a pack. Which people don’t like, based on historical packs we’ve done.
Bear in mind that back in the early 2000’s when BFD launched, it had for the time one of the biggest payloads going. Then BFD2 pushed that even further. By the time we got to BFD3, quite a few companies had cottoned onto the fact that you do need a certain level of detail to capture a drumkit faithfully.
There’s an art to deciding what to sample, how much to sample, and how detailed to make it. Most people are going to be pretty annoyed that we spend a load of time recording 400 samples for a ride cymbal, at the cost of them getting more kicks and snares to play with.
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Speaking of rides and hihats as well, I think it would be a good idea, at least for the larger expansions, to have two options for each. Dark Farm does have two hats and it really does make a difference when pairing between the shell options and choosing the one that fits the best. There is only one ride though (I’m not a huge fan of it) and having a couple options for rides would be really helpful. For the smaller expansions I totally understand keeping the cymbal assortment limited.