What have you made with BFD?

How about we get a thread together with what we’ve made using BFD?

I’ll kick off with my first ever serious attempt at programming to try and sound like a real drummer might sound. I hired a session drummer and when I got the multitracked files, I tried to recreate his work with BFD and then fix what I didnt like about his drumming but still keep it sounding ‘real’.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing to start with and it was a very, very steep learning curve. I feel I could do much better these days, but its so time consuming that I started trying to find ways to streamline the work and not have to edit every individual hit on every individual kit piece. The track as whole was that way, I’d never made anything like this before and this steep learning curve was a nightmare. Very glad I did it tho…

Anyone else fancy sharing their BFD work?

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This probably wasn’t the first thing I recorded using BFD2 and I’m not sure what was but it was the first song I recorded using bits of the 8 bit Kit and the Flexatone from the percussion kit.
I absolutely loved that flexatone.

One day it might develop into a fully fledged song but for now it’s just noodling.

Steve

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@Steve63 That opening is amazing, a proper kick in the face wake up! Reminds me of some Tom Waits. Sounds very fresh and live! Awesome stuff!

EDIT: Just started following you on Soundcloud. Is all your stuff BFD? Sounds great!

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Thank you and yes, huge Tom Waits fan here and although I was intending buying the 8bit Kit beforehand, I read that the guy who put it together worked or produced the Bone Machine album so that was definitely an inducement. It’s the Leedy kick that worked so well for this song, it’s wild and organic.

Every time I tried to put a vocal to this song I just drifted into his voice and it really sounded like Murder In The Red Barn which is an amazing song.

Pretty much everything on the soundcloud page is BFD3 (or BFD2) with the exception of Flesh (not even me) Rather Nice Pheasant, Tobacco in the Butter You Burk and I Am The Man.

I need to get back to making music but work and this awful diploma I’m almost at the end of has really held me back.

Steve

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I didnt know this! Wow.

Not 100% sure it was Bone Machine but definitely worked with Waits and I’m fairly sure it was Bone Machine.

Being a guitar playing singer/songwriter who’s played in bands all my life I’ve always wanted to make my music as live and organic sounding as possible, it’s probably the thing I loved most about BFD2 then 3 is that the drums sounded so much more like they do in a studio or on stage than anything I’d heard.

It was the missing piece of the jigsaw, although I could probably get slightly better guitar and bass sounds with a proper amp set up my Pod X3 lives gives me some very usable replications of the real thing so I can make stuff that sounds almost real now. :wink:

I’m a terrible keyboard player though and listening to the 8bit Blues again makes me think I really need to tidy that up. :roll_eyes:

Steve

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The keys sound totally appropriate to me :slight_smile:

I just listened again. Its a great ad for the 8 Bit Kit.

EDIT: I posted this in another thread and just realised I shoulda posted it here. This is all BFD. Next video I make will feature the kit I’m using, so I’ll put BFD in the actual video too. It’ll be a mostly automated hardware performance, with BFD.

EDIT: I have a decent neck thru bass (being a lover of the rickenbacker sound) but I dont play well enough, and Kontakts Scarbee Rickenbacker bass sounds lovely. I tend to use that on everything too. BFD and the Rickenbacker is a great combo :smiley:

Latest work in progress:

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I did listen to some of Beautiful Humans last week, some of the sounds are great but I became more drawn to the video than the music if I’m honest and found it bit too long.

I absolutely love Get Baxter, took me all of two seconds to like it, great feel to the rhythm and simple but loose melody.

Excellent stuff.

Steve

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I can see that about Beautiful Humans, for sure. I lost an entire hard drive of works in progress, and that was essentially unfinished, and could have done with more edits.

Thanks about Get Baxter, far from finished, wanna simplify it a bit and shorten that too. Its from my latest Les Baxter remix project. Take one Les Baxter album, and grab samples and loops from it. Then make 1 song using those loops, and just develop what comes out. Then move on to the next Les Baxter album :slight_smile: Repeat until I have an album worth of remixes, each track made from 1 Les Baxter album :slight_smile:

The last Les Baxter remix album suffered the same fate. All files lost in the same hard drive crash. Oh well, easy come, easy go :slight_smile:

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Great work guys! BFD is quite convincing in the right hands. I find the mixer super useful as well. I often mix the entire drum performance within BFD3. It is my main drum instrument and I’ve used it since the beginning when it was included with Pro Tools. I love the endless tweaking I can do with it. I use it on everything. What I like to do is take a recording I admire and try to faithfully replicate every detail of the recording. It’s great for honing critical listening skills and learning production techniques. I did this with a few Soundgarden tunes. Here’s one. I played all the instruments and sang. The drums were played on a Zendrum controller triggering a custom kit I made in BFD3. The performance is played in live and overdubbed in sections (so not programmed.).

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Excellent, I would say your mix is slightly better than the original and although I could say, well theirs was recorded 27 years ago and technology has come on a bit since, technology is no guarantee of a great final product.

Steve

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Really good, what snare did you use ? I like the transient !

And for all records posted here, I would never though of a midi drum if it wasn’t mentioned. Great job with that !

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Basically whenever you hear a drum on one of my songs it’s BFD3 so…
I am working on album no 3 right now so the latest release is still Information Overload from 2019 and funny enough TWO drummers I know asked me if I had gotten a drummer for that one. All my songs sound better on streaming sites as I remastered them for those but YouTube is easier to link: DrScythe - Information Overload (Original Music Video 2019) #30 of 100 - YouTube

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I can’t believe I’d never heard of Les Baxter but I probably would have heard his stuff in films before.

What track or album was the Get Baxter track taken from?
I’d like to hear the original to see what you’ve done.

Love what you did with Kings of the Wild Frontier, an album I’m well familiar with, Ant Invasion being one of my favourite tracks.

Is that your, modus operandi then, reworking and remixing snippets from albums to make something new? I like the results thus far.

Steve

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Get Baxter is from the album Kaleidescope.

I had another Les Baxter album of almost complete remixes and then lost all the files.

This track woulda been a great single, so close to finished. This is taken from the Les Baxter soundtrack to the film Hell’s Belles. The vocal samples are some random archive.org movie. I have a lot of unfinished tracks based around samples from archive.org copyright free/public domain films.

And this would been my magnum opus… So close to being the best track i ever made, but the files all gone :slight_smile:

The full album remix idea started with that Adam Ant thing, then I realised I had like 50 Les Baxter albums and thought I could do the same thing with each one of those albums. My usual stuff was released under The Ear of Dr Yes name, so it obviously became The Ear of Dr Les, with each track being a Les pun. I ran out of puns tho :slight_smile: I’ll carry on doing the Les Baxter series until I run out of albums :slight_smile: I invariably end up only using a small handful of loops from each album. Out of maybe 20 loops, maybe 5 will inspire a new track. Just a bassline here, some drums there, a few chords, a stretched out string sample, etc etc.

The Ear of Dr Yes has usually been loop based stuff of mine. The stuff I do as Zygmont is mostly ‘live’ sounding ambient noise jazz funk weirdness and will likely continue as mostly hardware based, usually very heavily BFD and the Rickenbacker (tho both tracks above are full of BFD and the Rickenbacker too :slight_smile: ). Durangle Durangle was more poppy stuff but with me and a friend, me singing. The project failed. Everything apart from the Baxter stuff is kinda decided upon after the fact as to which name I’ll put it out under.

EDIT: The Baxter albums I have, some are cd, some are vinyl rips so the quality varies across the samples. Nearly all have barely audible bass and kick drums tho, and everything is within a fairly narrow frequency range, so it all usually gets the bass lines redone, and the drums.

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I think it was a Radio King. I needed one with alot of ring to it to get that trashy sound they got on that album. I remember when it came out, being used to tight snares like Neil Peart’s, or Vinnie Colaiuta, I absolutely despised the snare sound on Spoonman. I didn’t research it so I was going off what I was hearing while auditioning snares in BFD3. I just looked it up and apparently he used a Kiplinger Metal Snate which would explain the massive ring. I came to appreciate the drum sound from that album with less artificial reverb and more room mics etc.

Just checked, Get Baxter started as 43 loops/one shot samples from Kaleidescope.

I think I used maybe 4 or 5.

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I used to (and still do) complain about how so much rap music just took other peoples riffs and even whole songs talked over them.

You’ve taking it to a new extreme but created something quite original. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Steve

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Where is the Radio King snare from ? BFD2 ?
I can’t find any info on the net :confused:

And I’m totally like you. Before I didn’t like ringy snare or toms with lot of resonance. I muffled my drums a lot. IRL or in my virtual drums. Now I really like to play harmonics.

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Yes, it’s from the BFD2/London Sessions, Slingerland Radio King Select.

Steve

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