(also posted this on Reddit, before finding this forum)
I’ve recently upgraded to BFD 3.5 (MacOS) and invested in some expansion packs for the first time (taking advantage of some rather attractive sale prices!). I’m experiencing a couple of issues, which I’m wondering if anyone has encoutered/solved since the 3.5 update.
Does anyone have any tips for balancing the samples (e.g. for London Sessions, where the content is too loud). I’ve read into a bit and found previous Reddit posts referencing the GitHub repository below with some scripts, but I can’t seem to match up what I’m seeing in the 3.5 installation to the instructions shown there. Does anyone know if this stuff still works after the update to 3.5 or have workarounds if not?
Scripts here:
I’ve never really looked into the grooves much, but seems like loads of the “palettes” in the browser fail to load with a message “BFD3 failed to load preview bundle”. Is that normal behaviour?
Bit of an annoyance. I moved a couple of the libraries to an external disk to make space (reinstalling using the inMusic client) and now have some duplicates presets, kits etc in the browser, which don’t have any content, just showing as blank icons. I tried rescanning under “Setup content locations” but can’t get rid of these.
I would start off by either muting the ambient channels in the mixer, or taking out the ambients for each kit piece and gradually bringing them back in.
An awful lot of that volume and wildness is in the ambient channels.
I’ve not had any issues with grooves and pallets not loading.
Was it happening before you reinstalled?
It could be that it’s trying to reference grooves that no longer exist.
Your duplicates kits and presets will probably be in their own folders.
A quick way to locate through BFD3, is to right click on a kit, or preset in the browser and click, ‘show in explorer’. I’m assuming you can do this on a mac.
Planky:
Welcome to the forum! Once you get used to BFD it is difficult to open up the many other drum programs that most people have, including myself. I try, but once you get past the BFD learning curve it is quite appealing.
Steve is absolutely right about the ambient channels often being the cause of wild levels. Wise words. It is good practice just to take them down to zero as a starting point and then bring them back up until the ambience sounds the way you want it to. I good place to do that on a kit piece basis is in the right KPI panel, as shown below:
If levels are still too hot at that point (which often happens) you can drop the faders or use the trim knobs on the individual channels. Yet another method that should be explored is the velocity curve graph in the key map area, which is specific to each kit piece.
I hate to break it to you, but there is a lot of variation in volume from one expansion pack to the next. And from one kit piece to the next. You may as well resign yourself to doing a lot of tweaking to get things the way you want. And it is smart to save the presets for future use so you don’t have to go through the process again.
Be sure to try the “load random kit” in the file menu. A lot of times that is a good jumping off point for a creative new sound. Invariably you have to substitute out a few kit pieces, but it’s pretty fun!
I never intended to get a ton of expansion packs . . . but here we are! There are a wide variety of styles and I don’t feel like it was all duplication. Just note that some packs have all kit pieces, and others may pretty much just have snares or cymbals, etc. If you need to know any expansion pack sizes on disk let me know. You’d think that would be easy to locate, but no. Some are really huge. For example Dark Farm is about 90Gb. And 8 Bit Kit is only about 6GB. So they are all over the place.
I was a beta tester on BFD3.5 and I can honestly say I never had a single crash the entire time. Maybe I’m just lucky.
