Here’s my review for the Sonic Reality - Bob Siebenberg Kit
Pros:
The raw kit as a whole, even with it’s limited direct mics sounds great
There are a few alternate articulations for the Ride, Crashes and Toms for some variation. *I just want to add that the alternate, choked crash cymbal articulations are fantastic. Way more realistic than using the standard choke function in BFD3.
All the cymbals are really good. They definitely add a special, lively vibe to the kit.
Room mic doesn’t have a huge sound, but it adds a nice glue without being too over the top
Toms have nice depth and snap. They don’t require a lot of dampening. I really like these.
Kick has a nice punchy attack. A good balance of tightness and low end
There are 7 Snares. There are 3 that I find usable… BS Snare6 being my favorite. Good body, overtones and decent crack
Cons:
The Drum Mapping was confusing and I had a hard time out of the gate trying to make sense of it. No grooves were lining up right even using various other Maps. I eventually just made one with BFD3 mapping.
Lacks a few Direct mics. There is a Kick In only mic, no Kick Out. There are no Direct Cymbal mics, only the Hi Hat, which can be confusing because you can hear them (OH/Room mics), but you don’t see any meter activity on the direct channels. Those I don’t mind, so much as the absence of a Kick Out.
The Snare Rim Shot articulation on the first snare is too low in volume, but they all kinda sound weak to me. Some of the velocities sound like they are triggering a Side Stick hit, instead of a Rim Shot.
It comes with a handful or so of Presets, but I didn’t find them particularly good or useful. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between some of them.
There are no Kit presets
There are some Timbales with brush and stick hits, but as has been noted by a few users, the Timbales have a bug and crash BFD3, so I haven’t really bothered with them.
Verdict: 7/10
My gripes are what brought the score down, otherwise this thing would’ve been a 9/10 and sound-wise it deserves that. Was it worth the sale price of $35? I’d say so, but this is coming from someone who doesn’t get too bothered with imperfections and quirkiness with an expansion. However, for a new user, I could see them being underwhelmed and frustrated a bit. Maybe it was just me, but I wasn’t able to download and get going with this thing straight away and that’s a Debbie downer. That said, I totally understand that this is an ancient kit and probably doesn’t get updated, other than the installer recently…
Here’s a video of my mix on the kit with BFD3 FX On and Off.
I planned on going over each articulation for each kit piece as well, but I really suck at putting vids together with OBS and DaVinci Resolve, so I cut it short.
I don’t really use the on-board BFD3 FX all that much, but I’ve been trying to explore the them more to see what they can do. Listening back, I’ve probably got too much sizzle and need to add back some mids. Also, this was the longest I’ve spent using the groove editor. I normally just program in my DAW, but I kinda started liking it. The groove FX is actually really useful to tweak the realism a bit.
Even with all of it’s quirks, the more I explore BFD3, the more amazed I become at what it has to offer.
Same here, the onboard effects are really powerful, you can hear this especially when loading processed kits and then turning the effects off, major difference. A few months ago I started importing the entire track I had progged in DAW into BFD and then editing in the groove editor using the groove FX to tweak the realism, great results!
Yes, I had this same thought a while back. I keep forgetting to try that.
The thing I like most though about using the editor to create parts, is that you can easily move notes to different articulations of a kit piece much easier than in DAWs like Pro Tools, that only have a piano roll to go by.
Spot on, it’s really useful for that and haha I keep meaning to do more of that too. I have moslty only even progged within the DAW, but lately with all the expansions and grooves I have been auditioning, these feautures are right in my face and difficult to ignore now!
On the strength of your review I googled Sonic Reality - Bob Siebenberg Kit - and got to their website. What kind of company doesn’t have a sales page on their site? What kind of company doesn’t list the price of their goods? Not even a link to a third party re-seller.
I’ve encountered other companies (not many) who don’t have prices on their products website, but instead have a separate e-commerce site. However, there is only one store link on the SR website under Support and not easy to find. So agreed, they probably should have a more accessible link to the store.
I’ve always viewed their products from the store anyways.
It’s funny cos I emailed their support about this, and the rather terse response was “all our products are available from our website at esoundz.com” - so they have a Sonic Reality website and we’re supposed to guess that in order to buy we have to go to soundz… I know I’m being picky but really in this day and age you’d think they could get their SEO right. I had literally googled the name of their kit, and landed on a Sonic Reality page with no links or buy now , ho hum, their loss! Mind you it looks as if their website was created on an Atari 1040 in 1995 so it’s no surprise really…
I’ve replied to your ticket. I’ve also noticed that some search engines are listing eSoundz in their search results and some are not. I have forwarded all this to the web guy.
