twaddle

Also with regards to mixing, use the bfd mixer and effects, they are seriously top notch and much better than sonars.

Hmm... I'm a huge BFD fan, but I think this is a bit of a bold claim.

Well yes maybe but as a dedicated drum mixing environment I prefer
working in bfd's mixer to sonars, I think it has some really smart intelligent features that I wish sonars mixer had.
It is a little more complicated though, especially when automating fx but I've got that covered now after much hair pulling at the time :)
Everything is easy once you know how.

Steve

Just my 0.02 for the OP, once you've got everything the way you want in terms of the kit itself, the routing wthin BFD and the routing within Sonar, save the preset in BFD as Steve suggests but also  SAVE it immediately as a template  in Sonar, then you can recall it in the future and not waste valuable time re-inventing the wheel.

To Davie & Harpo and any other BFD'ers out there, I just put up a BFD/sonar template that is a quick set up I made if you want to tear it apart and see how the routing works. Hopefully it will be of some use. I'm not saying it's good and it's certainly not mixed in anyway.
I'll just say this to Davie (I think) it's best to do all the routing from within
bfd's mixer as you've already discovered, it's much more confusing to do it from inside of sonar by adding an audio track and then trying to route bfd as an input.

Steve

Oh yeah the template is in a rar file which hopefully wont be a problem.

I'm sorry, but it's not clear to me. After choosing "All Synth Audio Outputs: Stereo", i should go to BFD2's mixer, and change the Master from each track to one of the options (Stereo from 1 to 8 and Mono from 1 to 16). But there's 18 tracks on BFD mixer, and only 16 on Sonar. Does that mean that i should route more than one track from BFD to a Sonar track ? And if so, what would be a good setting ? Another question: when i first open BFD (or even Ezdrummer) and i play it, it always clips, like at 8,1 dB. So i find myself always having to lower down the master volume. Is this normal ? If not, what could i do to fix it ?

I always lower the individual faders in the BFD mixer by about 10dB just to avoid this sort of thing.

Some of the hits as you've discovered are very loud.

You can use one side of any of the BFD stereo pairs to assign additional kit pieces.
Change the input channel in sonar by using Inspector and scroll to your exposed BFD inputs

Even with the most complex kit I've ever set up, there's always a way to route it onto it's own channel in Sonar with a bit of lateral thinking!

  When you say there are 18 tracks (channels) on the BFD mixer you are right but you won't need to output them all separately. I'm wondering if perhaps you are counting things like there are three channels for the snare, two channels for the top and one for the bottom? You don't have to route them to individual outputs, most commonly you would send them all to one output.
When I say "all", I mean the three snare channels you would rout them all to the same output. If you look at the template (link at the bottom) I uploaded on th fxpansion forum you can see I have routed the three snare channels to an axillary bus, and that bus is then routed out to sonar.
 
I think also, unless you have some third party effects that you can't find in BFD 2's bundled effects or you think your third party effects are better (if they are the ones that come with sonar that probably wouldn't be the case) then there is no need to use sonars mixer.
 
You could just having BFD routed to the master out and then learn to use BFD's very excellent mixer which I think in many ways is better than sonars. If you decide to try using BFD's mixer and just using the one master out I would still recommend using the "all synth audio outputs stereo" The reason being if you try the above method and decide you'd rather be using effects that aren't in BFD then those tracks will be there for you and you'll just have to change the outputs in BFD's mixer. You can hide all of the other 17 of sonars tracks using the "track manager"
 
Have you watched any of the tutorials for BFD 2? Like this one (http://www.youtube.com/wa...P73pk&feature=related)
 
 
Also, did you see I uploaded a sonar/BFD template that has a drum loop loaded and is pre-routed so you can have a look to see how it can be set up?
You can find that one here
(http://www.fxpansion.com/...pic.php?p=72050#72050)
 
You don't have to have it set up that way but once you get to see how it's done you can make your own and save them as templates. BFD and sonar together give you very flexible routing options but they don't have to be complicated, that's up to you.
 
Good luck
 
 
Steve

Just been messing around with BFD and doing some automation so I thought I'd share it as a template with anyone who's interested.
This didn't take long at all.

The first one (and I think the best one) I realised was made with the Yamaha cocktail Kit which most of you probably wont have so I made a load more using the same idea but with different kits and a few variations.

It's a crazy sounding thing I've created but if it demonstrates anything then it clearly shows that with the very excellent bundled effects you don't have to use BFD 2 for just acoustic sounding drums and would sound great in some techno grime.
I had a little play around with using pitch automation on the kick drum which was great fun. You can see the midi automation track at the bottom of the template.

The Yamaha cocktail is superb for that and has a very close intimate sound. Anyone thinking about expansions to get I'd definitely recommend you take a closer look.
Hope the templates load ok, they were done in 8.5, I have X1 expanded but still to scared to learn it properly.
Cheers
Steve

Oh yeah, almost forgot, here are the links

 BFD2 Templates Let me know if they download ok, they are not zipped.

Hey Steve, have you upgraded BFD2 to 64 bit yet?

I noticed there was a download available over at the Fxpansion board

Hi Jonesy

Oh yes, I got it as soon as I heard it was available.
Not noticed any major performance boost on my machine but much nicer not to have to use jbridge though.

Steve