Question about BFD and other Drum VST's

BFD 3 is AWSOME!  Sounds are incredible.  The presets are incredible.

That being said..if you want something quick, down and dirty, get the X3 Pro upgrade
that comes with Addictive Drums.  They are quite good and sit in a small footprint and
sound very nice.  There are lot's of ADPaks and MIDI as well.

If I had to choose ONE....BFD 3 HANDS DOWN.  I haven't heard anything better (yet)
And I have them all.

As far as acoustic drum sounds go BFD3 has really raised the bar. I preferred Superior Drummer to BFD 2 by a nose but BFD3 is something else.
 
How much tweaking do you do to your BFD sounds? EQ, Compression and distortion effects can be quite effective if you want to drastically change the character of the sound.
 
If you are looking for synthetic drum sounds NI's Battery 4 is one for your shortlist, it's not so great for acoustic kits (but there are some), it's the electronic percussion where it excels.
 
Others for the shortlist are FXPansion's Tremor and Arturia's Spark
 
 

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strikinglyhandsome1
I use Battery and Guru for non-acoustic stuff. There's Geist, Punch and Microtonic available too. Tremor, Drumazon and Spark as well. A lot of people layer drums or buy single hit packs or use Vengeance samples.

I do not have BFD, but picked up Geist during the holiday season primarily to deal with step sequencer issues I have been having. Another side reason was the sampling/slicing capabilities, since my "issue" with AD is not being able to export sounds to another source or import sounds into the AD kit. I just came to the realization that I don't need hundreds of kits made by others... I need MY personal kit (with options), and the easiest way to play it effectively.

The BFD3 manual has instructions for exporting its loops.

munmun
Well I downloaded the BFD3 demo and was astonished!  Frick I bought it.  Next Battery is looking pretty sweet.  As I download BFD3, does anyone know whether I can export BFD3 loops from BFD3 to use with Battery?  Supposedly Battery has no midi loops.

You can export the BFD3 loops as midi but I would suggest loading BBFD3 and battery and then just dragging the loops from BFD3 in to battery's midi track.
 
Just out of interest, you said your drums sound dated but you're still recording guitar rock ?
What kind of modern drum sound are you after ? Who are your influences, likes and such.
 
You're not wrong about BFD3 and there's also a 50% sale on expansion kits as noted above by gmon72.
 
Depending on what kind of sound you're after I'd recommend the cocktail kit, it's small and cheap but has such a unique and very flexible sound. It has that kind of metallic basement sound. I find I'm using it in a lot of my projects and it makes a huge difference.
 
Steve

That is interesting about the cocktail kit.  Do you have any examples of music I could listen to?  In terms of style and genre and influences mine vary from the classic rock era to a lot of 80's and 90's guitar driven band.  I am fumbling around searching for sounds.  So I want a palette of sounds to experiment with.  Battery is certainly an exciting purchase for me as it is uncharted territory.  I have also bought some D&B, Trance'ish loops to ****e up my drum tracks.  My intent is to turn everything on its head.  Rather than write on guitar first, I am trying to compose the rhythmic foundation first.  Then the melody.  Then the instruments that follow.  I was messing around with this approach yesterday and it paid some dividends.  So I am quite excited.


 
I only have one track up on line that uses the cocktail kit right now that's just a short instrumental noodle that needs whipping in to a proper song. I have quite a few tracks that are in their embryonic stage and I'm very slow to get them finished but you can here the one track here Abstraction
 
I have heard your stuff before now I come to think of it and was very impressed with your song writing.
The first track on your facebook page sounds like the orange county snare from BFD2, could I be right ?
 
You mention D&B then I think the cocktail kit is ideal for that, check out the demo's on the cocktail kit page, some great stuff they've done with some mashed up effects.
 
Steve
 

munmun
Good sound!  And cheap!  Do you use midi loops?  Keyboard drumming?  Sounds great!

Yeah I think it's got a great sound, nice ring to the snare, I love the D&B demo's.
Another kit that I really like is the 8 bit kit. It's not one I use often as it has some really unusual sounds but when I did use it it made all the difference, I used it in this little song (another unfinished experiment) 8 Bit Blues
 
I never use loops and write all my drums out in the PRV which I don't like doing but most of my songs are just too complex to spend ages browsing loops to see what fits. I actually find it quicker by hand. I'm pretty good at it after all the practice I've had. I would love something like a Roland TD-30KV V-Pro but even if I had the money I'm not that good a drummer. I play in a band and want my drummer to get something like that so he can use BFD3 in a live situation but for good reasons he's quite opposed to the idea but a pad controller would be a compromise I guess.
 
Steve

The thing that I have found with BFD2 is that you have a lot of ability to change sounds in it, IOW if I didn't like a cymbal sound there are tons of resources in BFD to change each sound individually...in addition, if you send each output invidivually to a track in X3 you have almost an unlimited variety of ways to play with any given track. You can squash the bass drum or bit crush it to death all depending on what you are going after. While this is somewhat true with other drum programs, I think it is even more so with BFD2. Now we have BFD3 which I don't have yet. Everyone is saying it is even better.
 
So I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "get with the times" but drums are still drums. If anything IMO drums are dumbed down in some of the more recent music I hear. Adding subbass to most any well mixed kick will give you a low bass kick. Most any decent compressor will pump it if that's what you want. Not sure...maybe BFD3 has a demo? Or you could check out youtube. I would bet you could get at least a decent idea of the sounds in it.
 
I am interested but my wallet hasn't caught up with me yet