Mono room mics are amazing at bringing more hype and more space out of the kit since you can focus and reinforce what the stereo rooms are doing while managing low end response in the sides and the mix as a whole. Also BFDs rooms consistently sound very live and organic, very easy to mix a monstrous kit with them.
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Why would you want to go backwards, . . . seriously?
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You mean forward in this sense.
Mono ambient channels are very useful when eq’d and blended in the mix nicely. I notice when I mute them that something is missing. You can get creative and mangle them too, for an effect.
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It would definitely be a backward step for BFD3.
Seriously, I think you must be missing the whole point of BFD3.
It was always about putting you in complete control of the raw unprocessed samples.
If you feel the need for more polished sounds then by all means use presets (it’s what they’re for) otherwise you may as well just use SD3.
Steve
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When I’m tracking drums for a project, I always set up a few mono mics. The trick is to automate their volume so that you only reinforce the drums you want - typically for me it is the kick and snare - and lower the level of them during tom rolls and cymbal work.
BFD is a production workstation for drums. We’ve got that bit down pat, and our libraries are consistently given compliments about how real they sound, in comparison to some of the competition.
Where I want us to catch up is in workflow, interface design, preset design, and groove quality.
Personally, I think some of our libraries are the best around, and the next one we’ve got coming up is really killer.
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They sound bad “mangled” that’s useless for effect. Most of the time only 1 of the mono mics sounds well enough to actually use or blend. They need to do more incremental ambient mics instead like, close, medium close, medium and far ambient channels would be far better than blending a boring mono channel that barely adds anything overall. The compressed mics and ambient mics are the ones to use. For sanre the mono blend works but not the rest of the kit because of the sympathetic garbage snare resonace which they need to do away with and sound to narrow which defeats the purpose of ambietn channels. I used to try to blend the monos but are just too subtle.
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No I think you missed the whole point. No one these days have the gear or time except professional studios to make bfd samples sound really great. So yes it looks like I will keep preferring toontrack (older libraries at that) which makes me cringe to say that because I love many things about bfd and fxpansion just not the narrow and small sounding samples. Most people don’t realize this until they compare it to something with a bit more as you say? “polish”
I don’t know why people think anything sounds better than BFD3, for me, nothing comes close, not even slightly. Everything else sounds over processed and like a (excuse the pun) drum machine lol
Each to their own and everyone hears what they want to hear I guess.
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I agree that the stock mono 1 mic is probably the most useful, but for me the expansion mono mics are where it’s really at, at least for some of them. Maybe for BFD4, they could include some of those other mono mics for the stock library?
Perhaps you were alluding to a different point. 
The point I was making was that the whole ‘mission statement and ethos’ of BFD3 (and BFD2) was to give the user the raw samples and the means to sculpt their own sound from those samples just like you would in an actual studio.
So to be asking BFD4 to give us preprocessed ‘professional sounding’ samples would be in opposition to that ethos that BFD has built it’s name and reputation on.
They would be abandoning one of the key features that had set it apart from it’s contemporaries.
Steve
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Amen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to that!!!
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We won’t ever move purely to a mix-ready approach. It’s not our thing. We strive to make desktop drums sound as close as possible to a real drumkit and a real drum recording session. That is our entire philosophy, boiled down into a trite marketing phrase. But it is the truth 
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And Amen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . to that!!!
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And what a fantastic move that was by the BFD Team, and they have done an absolutely superb job of that. BFD RULES!
They are amazing at that and thats one of my entire gripes. They add some dimension and the illusion of some width. They didn’t do a snare off recording of them! such a huge no no. to not have the option of snares on or off with every kit piece on every mic. rendering them useless except for of course… on a snare, and even on snare 2 out of 3 of them sound harsh. Its not 1970 anymore- its no good to have snare buzz in a mix unless its a live jazz recording or something. Its a huge amatuer move not having the option of snare on or snare off samples like DRUMASONIC has. BFD needs to take some ques and ideas from that software!! Its epic drum software
That is a shame because bfd has more detail in their recordings and samples… but i digress
If you wont make more polished mastered sounding stuff as an option then please take some ques from Drumasonic drum software. Its really good. They have full snare on/off separate sample sets for all channels. They have a really good decay and attack feature set with full control over both. Saves a lot of time from using different compressors and effects if in a time crunch which we usually are. It gets you to the sweet spot very fast. They have a global limiter (actually a global make up gain) on the master channel which is awesome.
Bleed? There are send knobs for bleed for each kit piece in BFD, turn them down if you don’t want them in the rest of the kit.
There’s a damping knob in tweaks. I wouldn’t mind if we had the ability to apply some virtual tapes and patches on the skins / cymbals. (This could be a modifier switch of the damping knob. Cutting frequencies and harmonics differently, depending on the placement of the sampled patch.)
You can insert many effects on any channel, including the master.
Give them a shot. If you didn’t find them, it’s because the GUI needs to be made more accessible. All have agreed to that.
Things I would like for the future.
- Ability to have snares on/off as one single drum.
- Ability to quickly load all same toms of the same set in one go.
- Ability to quickly swap drum with another random drum of the same kind.
- Complexity knob to keep the dynamics knob company. This is for play along purposes, or auto-BFD. Each groove should probably keep a tally of how many events it is comprised of. More events consistently on all x beats = higher complexity. ← well, ok, the algorithm sucks, you get the picture.
- Cross-stick sounds. Two or three will suffice.
- Make License Manager mass-extinction-grade proof.
- Make BFD more awesome than what it is already.
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I totally agree with you.
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Not sure if this is already a feature, but with the problems I have been having setting up content and importing grooves it would be awesome if there was a feature to auto remove grooves that have been imported twice? After doing a batch import it looks like there are way too many grooves in my browser?
Like a ‘remove all doubles’ for grooves, kits and presets.
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