I’m trying to convert my BFD2-using projects to BFD3. This is my first time really using BFD3, so it’s going painfully. Some of the changes seem to clearly be improvements, while others… I don’t know yet.
I can import presets saved from BFD2, which is helpful (though it didn’t load the Zildjian 20K Crash Ride from a my preset; WHERE in the UI do we find the name of the missing piece??)…
…But I am having difficulty understanding the mixing. The Direct fader is gone and I cannot find any reference to how the workflow is expected to change for people who used that fader in prior versions. Yes, I could select and adjust all the kit pieces’ direct faders together, but that’s less convenient and wasn’t giving me the same results when I tried to manually match the two versions of plugins.
When I opened the BFD2 preset in BFD3, it definitely sounded closer to the original sound I had, but there is nowhere I can SEE what is actually different between the loaded preset and my efforts to manually match the results. The individual directs aren’t moved when I load the preset. It’s as if there’s an invisible Direct Bus I can’t access.
Ahh, the direct buss fader. It took me a minute to recognize what you were talking about.
If you hit Tweaks, there’s a tiny knob labeled Direct on the Master fader. Yes, kind of annoying. BFD should consider putting an explicit Direct buss back in v4.
Once I start mixing in a DAW, I generally only send my overhead mic to the master fader. The directs get their own outputs, as do any room or ambient mics, if I use them.
What’s annoying is that I’ll generally use the same preset, but with 3 different mixers; one using just the master buss, another that’s a little more spaced out, and a third just for use in VEP, which (absurdly), has no mono busses. To deal with this, I’m using otherwise empty presets from which I only import the mixer. I’d really just prefer a separate mixer preset, like back in the BFD2 days.
We don’t, I’ve thrown it into the feature request hat but I’m not sure how viable it is.
I mean, how is BFD3 supposed to know what kit pieces are missing, all it knows is that it doesn’t have a match for them in it’s library. But then you ask, if it doesn’t have a match, then it must know what it’s looking for, and if it knows what it’s looking for and it can’t find it, then why can’t it tell you what it piece it is that it can’t find?
Hope that made sense
Not sure what you mean by, “the direct fader” The mixer is pretty much the same as BFD2 with regards to faders, the biggest difference being the addition of the mini mixer which I don’t really use.
You have your channel faders (direct mics) your ambient channel faders and your master fader.
What am I missing?
Well, I just randomly poked around and accidentally learned how to quote others’ posts, so there’s something… And then the forum told me how to quote people when it chastised me for posting several replies in a row over on the preview panel. SIGH.
Anyway, I am not sure I understand. BFD presets, etc., have some kind of string/pointers to content to be loaded. It should SHOW US the pointer in the UI somewhere. WHY do they NOT have this? When a plugin is missing, a DAW says “Missing Plugin: [name of plugin]”.
I still have BFD2 so I opened it up and I can’t believe I’d forgotten all about that.
I don’t think I ever really used it which might be why fx felt no need to keep it in BFD3.
(And no, I’m not saying fxpansion got rid of it on my account )
It basically just turns all the direct mics up/down leaving just the ambient mics.
To do the same in BFD3 you would have to mute all the direct channels on the mixer or solo just the ambient channels unless there’s some other way of doing what the direct fader did in BFD2.
Should have said, it you click a channel in the mixer, (say kick) then turn the direct dial down, it just turns the kicks direct channel down. I don’t think BFD2 does that, when I tried it in BFD2 just now it seemed to turn down all the directs.
It used to be right there next to Overhead, Room, Ambient. Look at some BFD2 screenshots.
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