I’m fairly new to the BFD realm, I have a few expansion packs: VRT, Dark Farm and Jazz Noir. However, I’ve found these have a lot of noise, hissing, buzzing on the samples. I am not hearing these issues with the stock library, so I’m not sure what’s going on. The noise is so loud that it’s basically unusable, especially on the HiHat foot for example.
First off, is this normal? Like is it just the noise of the analog recording chain + ambient noise from the studio? If so, what are some tips you guys have for decreasing some the noise?
If it’s not normal, how would one go about fixing it?
I’ve tried the envelope shaper, damping, velocity tweaking, changing sample rates and buffer size, different combinations of preferences, but nothing has worked so far.
I like the sound of BFD vs others, and it feels way better to play on my ekit, but I’m struggling to get everything working correctly.
The noise is appearing when I’m just loading kit/kitpieces, so there are no effects that I know of that are on. I can even hear it just soloing a single channel.
I will post some sound examples later on, when I get home.
I just picked a couple random ones to use as example, but the noise is on pretty much every drum and mic and so it adds to itself and gets worse the more mics I use or if I hit multiple drums together.
Some of them aren’t the easiest to hear on soundcloud after whatever compression and noise filtering they do to it, I however did no processing.
I just updated the link hopefully it will work now.
The thing is I completely uninstalled everything, a little while back and recently reinstalled after the last update and I was having this issue before as well. So I’m not to sure reinstalling would fix it, unless there is something I’m doing wrong in the download/install process.
I am at work with shitty headphones, I can’t really hear what you are talking about from that soundcloud clip, can you not attach the mp3 directly here? I had an issue with a few weeks ago where after exporting tracks there was some digital interference, the guys were saying it might be a hard drive issue. I’ve been absent for a while and haven’t had a chance to test any further. Let me go check that post.
I see no updates yet, but if you go here and listen to what I posted you’ll hear what I mean:
Yea something is definitely not right. I’m not sure it’s a drive issue for me, as I have tried both an external HDD and an NVMe SDD.
I wonder if maybe it is another piece of hardware or driver that is leaking noise into the USB? Gonna try bare minimum setup in another room to see if maybe it’s a ground loop or something. Hopefully I can isolate what is causing it, as it appears it might be a hardware issue and not actually a BFD issue.
I work with creating Samples and Libraries…a lot…enough to drive one crazy…
I hear this all the time especially when creating Sample Libraries for Drum Modules or Live Performers triggering samples etc…it’s extremely noticeable in Drum Modules and sounds like Digital Artifacts…that sometimes abruptly Fizzle out…(Tech Term…lol)
Sounds to me like Room noise,broadband noise or self-noise from electronics…all equipment produces it during recording , if you listen closely you’ll probably hear it on the Tails on the majority of samples…Preview/audition under “Drums” watch the meters dance around at anywhere from 2-4 bars then drop as the Tail finally ends.
You should hear what my 30+ year old 2" Tape samples sound like…
I attached the same MP3 after 1 quick pass at 48dB…1 Band…after getting a Noise profile from it…I would spend some more time with different Noise levels so as not to cut the Tail short on different samples…but it’s a quick example.
Depending on what DAW/Software etc…you can use “Noise Reduction” a De-noiser…one with adaptive capabilities works best…or replace with silence.
EDIT:
Added some FREE Plugins (Classic is FREE…Pro is Paid…)
and Videos for the Classic and Pro where it’s applied to the same noise…
After doing some testing I found similar noise at varying levels on just about everything, as you said. Even windows sounds which lead me to test different computers and come to the same result.
I think the issue lies in a few things:
Needing sufficient level for the ekit to feel right and not hear the pads.
The noise is found on each sample and so it is additive which is not what happens in real life, where the noise would be constant. This causes a whooshing sound as more drums are played or on rolls.
The noise floor of my interface + headphone amp being boosted to get the sufficient level for the ekit.
My preference for use of little mics, usually just 1 kick mic, 1 snare mic and OHs. Most libraries are recorded with the sound of all the mics together in mind (as they should cause why put a mic up if you’re not gonna use it.) So this makes it so the level of my tracks has to be increased to a similar level as the “fully mic’d” kit, which in turn raises the noise floor.
(MAYBE) BFD doesn’t use round robins + velocity layers and instead just uses a bunch of velocity layers, therefore the lower velocity layers will have worse SNR (obviously), however possibly other samplers have adjusted the gain for their velocity layers, so as to get the best SNR at each layer. Again this is all speculation, I could easily be way off here.
These all add together to make the ekit experience in particular quite annoying.
I will try the noise reduction as you suggested, but I feel like the artifacts aren’t going to be worth it for me.
The expander as another user suggested might actually be a possible solution. The deesser as well, but it would probably take too much away from the cymbals.
I’ll have to play around with some things and see if I can get it down to a level that is usable in realtime without noticable artifacts. Sounds like a difficult task lol.
I was thinking of upwards expansion, like the Waves MV2, hence my confusion. That’s really the only type of expansion that I tend to use. Thanks for clarifying Kafka.
This isn’t anything to do with your hardware or setup. This is a combination of microphone noise, preamp noise, and console noise. We do denoise our samples, but we don’t kill them to the nth degree, because it really can have adverse effects on the transients of the samples.
There is a noise-gate effect in the mixer, you can also use the dampening model to tighten up the samples, you can also use the built in per-voice envelope shaper to reduce the sustain of the samples slightly, which will calm the noise down a bit too.
We always try to cross reference our sessions with other packs and the competition to make sure we’re within an expected window of noise. I just did this with a competitors product again to sanity check myself, and I’m quite satisfied that our noise floors aren’t too extreme.
Fun story, when recording my bands last album, I ran a pretty heavy RX denoise pass over all of my stems. When I listened back to them later on, the phase coherency of the transient of every single hit across all drums was completely hosed. Fortunately I kept the non-processed versions, so could get up and running again, but that was a scary few days!