BFD2/BFD3 + playability issues

[drewfx]

Hi guys,

Drew from FXpansion here. I'm doing a bit of research. I occasionally see comments coming from e-drummers about BFD's playability from ekits, so I want to know what you all think of BFD from this viewpoint. Hoping to get a bit of a conversation going about this to feed back into the development process. Is there anything we could be doing better to help you get your ekit up and running quicker and easier?

[mutant]

When I bought my TD12 kit (I guess a few years ago now) I also bought BFD2.
As I can recall I had been reading good reviews from people on this forum, so that's why I choose to go ahead and purchase it.

But unfortunately I found BFD2 to be pretty much unplayable using Vdrums, this despite whatever I did to tweak it.
I even asked for any tips from people here but nothing seemed to make any noticeable improvement.
I also should perhaps mention that I installed it on a powerful custom built computer with a RME card, 24Gb's of RAM and a very fast SSD.

The fundamental issue for me was how when playing rolls the sound was quite artificial to my ears in terms of playability, machine gunning perhaps best describes it.
The sounds themselves are fantastic and would work great if I simply wanted to program beats.

I don't wish to be mean or whatever and maybe it is just me, but I honestly think of BFD2 as the worst VST drum plugin I ever purchased.
Recently I even downloaded and tried BFD3, but again unfortunately had the same exact issues.

[Kabonfaiba]

I haven't investigated too much yet, but I wasn't able to find a tap tempo function in BFD3 or a way to assign a MIDI key to it. The goal for me is to get my trigger bar to work as a metronome trigger. i.e. tap to hear metronome, sync tempo to taps, then switch off 16 beats later, would be an incredibly useful feature.

[OpposingMotion]

Hi Drew,

Great to see the Devs on this forum, i believe the discussions could be incredibly fruitful for all!

One of the main issues I experienced with BFD2 (and the BFD3 demo which possibly had limited vel layers) was what seemed to be an inconsistent use of the sample pool by the BFD engine when using Vdrums.

What I mean by this is that dynamics seemed very restricted, you would play either very soft or very loud and it was relatively easy (too easy?) to trigger the top velocities with toms and snare. You can of course alter the MIDI velocity curves to correct this and alter module settings but no amount of tweaking made me manage to get it to trigger perfectly although it was not far off!

There was also indeed quite a bit of machine gunning and this is clearly linked to the sample pool selection algorithms as it is clear that the pool is more than adequate to start with!! I had to limit the max velocities to 120 for example on the snare+toms to avoid bad machine gunning at high velocities.

The hats plays quite well in general, possibly lack the amount of details that the competition would have in terms of the number of various positions and quality of the the fade ins/out in real time.

Finally I believe that for a number of people, the high CPU/RAM demand of BFD engine is a barrier to play live without living in constant fear of a CPU crash! For me this has never been a problem in the studio.

Hope this helps a bit,

Cheers

[Ribot]

I depends on the kit choice, bfd3 are certainly an improvement on playability. But the kits differ quite a bit, on the td12 i have to use 1-2 trigger setting's, which lacks a bit dynamics compared to setting 3. I eagerly await the diti drum module, which will hopefully appear this year. It will hopefully cure and deliver better trigger behavior and reduce latency by 2 milliseconds. To the bfd people: IMHO bfd3 triggers loud velocities way to early and hot, which cannot be cured sufficiently in the roland module.

[Ribot]

Also drum tec will offer a new improved mesh 3 skin for better triggering and less bounce. Hopefully also a bit less hot spots.

[Ribot]

The ditti module http://youtu.be/NEUKRDd_nWQ

[seasack]

I only have BFDEco. I don't use it with my e-drums because of the machine gunning I experience. Great you're asking!

[drewfx]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback!

RE: Machine gunning. Are we talking about the exact same layer being triggered over and over?? Does this happen when you've got the anti-machine-gun mode enabled? Seems strange. If anyone has any presets that demonstrate this, it'd be interesting to take a look.

[abnorm]

I agree with OpposingMotion. Dynamics seem restricted. It is difficult to do a uniform drum roll starting with low velocities, ending with high. They seem to be jumping all over the place, accompanied by some machine gunning. Setting AMG to 50% helps a little bit, but doesn't solve the issue.
I use the same drum controller and pad with other drum libraries and have 0 issues like with BFD3, even though they don't even have AMG settings.

[drewfx]

I'd really like to investigate this dynamics issue that a few of you have raised. Does anyone have the following?

1. A clip of a snare from your favourite source, doing a roll from quiet to loud.
2. Midi of this same roll.

I can then figure out if BFD3 is doing something wrong and/or if it just needs a bit of a tweak.

[Kabonfaiba]

I'll be able to record my playing with BFD3! ...eventually. But really, you can just test it far easier just by clicking the velocity bar for the drum over and over in the same place and listen to the AMG in action.

E.g. Tama Bell brass, If I were to describe this in text, it would be like: hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit.

It almost seems like the velocity layers are in groups of quiet hits, medium hits, loud hits, very loud hits. i.e. not linear, it jumps between the groups even when played at the same velocity.

I hope that makes sense, I still need to research this more.

[PlatinumSamples]

I've seen that happen when the tweaks file is out of synch with the Data files... What size installation did you do? What's the Max Velocity Levels setting in your BFD3 Engine prefs? Rail

[drewfx]

I'll be able to record my playing with BFD3! ...eventually. But really, you can just test it far easier just by clicking the velocity bar for the drum over and over in the same place and listen to the AMG in action.

E.g. Tama Bell brass, If I were to describe this in text, it would be like: hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit, hit, hit, HIT, hit, hit.

It almost seems like the velocity layers are in groups of quiet hits, medium hits, loud hits, very loud hits. i.e. not linear, it jumps between the groups even when played at the same velocity.

I hope that makes sense, I still need to research this more.

It would be useful to know what your maximum velocity layers preference is set to in the BFD3 engine page. If it's something fairly low, like 32 say.... then it'll be missing a lot of detail, causing the jumps that you're talking about.

[OpposingMotion]

On my side the issues always happened with max details levels (high in preferences) and maxed out vel layers in pref engine (on an i7 quad core 16 Go RAM) so don't think it's related to prefs.