FXpansion BFD VST PC

Current audio PC: Intel Quad 6600 cpu. 4GB Ram. Tascam 1884 controller FW interface. 3 pairs of SATA 300 320 GB harddrives running in RAID 0

OS: WinXP Pro
DAW Software: SONAR Producer version 6.2

Ocupation: Software Engineer and audio/video contracting
35 years experience as a musician

Interface good.
Installation has definite issues when installing updates because of missing files on the DVD's that the updates are expecting. Had to spend hours in their forum on this one.

Manual good. Getting a good sound out of it is possible, just not reliable or consistent.

Sound quality good the few times it works

The problem with this product is that they just can't get ahold of the technology. I have tried this on 5 different audio setups and no matter how much horsepower you throw at it, it only promises delivery but just can't give it.

Looking at the reviews here, I have to wonder at what level these people are actually using it in realtime with how many tracks or plugins.
I agree, the features, samples and overall concept is fantastic. I had to have it. But honestly guys, this product is like a football team with the best recievers, linemen, tight-ends, etc. But when you have stuttering quarterback and a goosey center, it's hard to get the ball snapped!!!
That's exactly how this software performs when it has to share resources with the Host.
TONYMO's review is right on. DON'T do like we did and waiste your money until they come out with version 2. And then only after their forum has happy customers reporting using it for real.

Installing this and getting it to work was a MAJOR pain in the ass. But once it's up and running.....it was worth it. Top shelf. Almost beat the discs with a sledge. Glad I didn't.
Tip Send them an email right away. Don't get angry that you can't fix it yourself.
Tony Mowatt
New Market Va.

BFD it may work for the software engineer, it may work for the highest end of the computer savvy, and it no doubt works for the moderators of the Fxpansion site but it sure doesn't work for the average, reasonably well informed, diligent, NOT easily frustrated consumer.

I'm plenty frustrated now.

It doesn't install and work with Pro-Tools 7.3
I tried everything I could.
Obviously there's more.
Listed below are things I rectified

I need to download the current version
I need the correct 'data path'
I don't have the cpu's/in need of ram etc
I need to uninstall 'lite' or dis/re enable 'this or that'
that the problem is on my end- motherboard/os/daw icompatibility
....and more. I took care of the above.
I assure you, I spent almost as time trying to install BigF'inDisappointment than I did taking the bar exam.
and...I represent no other manufacturer.

I want my $$ back from fxpansion. (The Jazz/Funk extension...sure am glad I didn't open it)

This 'dog'....don't hunt. And just because you're seeing it for sale on a major retailer's site...and here's the hard lesson....it doesn't mean it will work. I'd strongly advise staying away.
Tony Mowatt
New Market Va.

Playing guitar for 17 years, producing music for about 4. Had this for about 8 months now. Plug is used with vst5 and ableton 4. Using xp with athalon 2.6 and 512ram. RME HDSP 9632 soundcard to yamaha diamond 8.2 active moniters.

The initial impressions of the interface are that there is a lot going on. You definately need to use the manual, which is very good, to understand what on earth all the little buttons and windows do. The is the ability to road test kits with the sampled midi style files in a rather massive midi library. Problems come if you don't have much memory. I'm struggling with 512ram, you could do with double that to get the best out of this. Problems occur when the kits have loaded and you try and playback. Tracks stutter and on more than one occasion the host application has fozen the pc has needed re-starting. This might have something to do with the massive sound library BFD comes with.

What you have is 7 kits only. All of them velocity layered and no brushes. No silly plinky plonky sounds or radical samples, just accoustic drum kits. They are, however, the best sampled and layered drums kits on the market at the moment (I've yet to hear stylus' sage expanders yet). You're never going to fool a drummer with these sounds, but everyone else will be amazed. With clever use of effects you can make this kit sounds truely special, again with any drum sampler, if you use it on every track you're going to spot it, but BFD has its place as the most realistic accoustic drum sampler out there.

Yes it was worth the price tag, i will not be buying the expansion packs though, at 24gb worth of samples i haven't got the space. There is no other sampler out there that offers what BFD does, some people might say battery or rmiv, but their accoustic kits sound very processed and don't have the serious velicity layering going on here. Stylus new SAGE expanders might offer something different, but i'll have to wait and see. The midi style files are cracking and with a bit of tweaking provide an excellent building block for me when i'm making tracks. As i've already said it chews up memory like you would not believe. This leads to it being very unstable on low memory machines.

I've been in bands, engineered and now I'm composing music for TV. I play piano, also violin, guitar and drums.

I had lot of problems installing at first but the update patch seemed to sort them out. Once up and running it's a breeze.

This sounds just amazing. This to me is better than having a real drummer, because you have the sound of a great kit in a great studio, and it does what it's told. Using compression on the separate audio (room mics, overheads, PZM) outputs yields fantastic big punchy sounds.

In the world of achieving perfection, I guess there's still a (very) slight artificiality to repeated crash and open hats, but this is well disguised if you have the room mics splashing away with compression. Also, the lack of brushed kits is a minus and I for one would like to see super realistic tambourines and shakers take their place alongside these fantastic sounds.

Yes it's well worth the price. I'm sure the lack of brushes and percussion can be resolved at a later date, as well as the modelling of realistic multiple cymbal hits (you know that accumulating crescendo roll sound).

Overall though, this is a huge quantum leap in drum machine technology; it blows all competition out of the water and leaves you thinking 'at last! perfect drums!'.

I've been making music since 1991, on keyboards, guitar and bass. This review applies to BFD v1.08 for PC, on SONAR 3 and Cubase SX2. I'm using the BFD as a songwriting aid and as a tool for producing new loops, on an Athlon XP1800 PC, Tannoy Reveal speakers.

Very intuitive and easy to use; installation a bit finicky though. No copy protection. Full support for automation and MIDI CCs. Sounds absolutely stunning right out of the box; very nice printed manual.

Sounds fantastic unprocessed - sounds even better with a touch of compression and EQ from the UAD-1 plugins. The most realistic drum library I've heard, by far. Runs in stereo and multichannel.

Great value for money, when you consider that it covers all the bases of both Steinberg's Groove Agent and Toontracks's DKFH2, and sounds and works better than either, to boot. Never crashed, but a bit resource heavy - needs lots of RAM and a fast hard drive. My only wishes are that it could output the MIDI from its built-in drum machine to the host, and that the library included some brushed drums.

I have been studing and making music since 1979. I play piano, guitar, sax, violin and now through BFD drums. I have purchase Fxpansion BFD and patched to version 1.0.7. This application is used within Sonar 3.1.1 Producer. I currently am in a Megadeth/Yes/Vai music stage. My main instrument is the guitar. Music production is done on a 2.4 Ghz intel with 2 gig of system memory and 320 gig of hard drive storage. My DAW consists of a MOTU 828 MkII, Mackie 828's with Sonar 3.1.1.

The first issue that I had was that the program was delivered as version 1.0.0, and did not work properly at all. A quick visit to the web site and a download of version 1.0.7 put everything in its place. The manual should be written with a default directory placement description. My DAW has a drive for Windows/XP/Sonar 3.1.1, music audio and BFD, it would have been nice to know exactly what was going to happen so that I would'nt have freaked out when the install started placing files on my windows drive. Please note that BFD suggests that placement of the sound samples be delivered to the audio program through its own drive, but there are certain items that are placed on your windows drive. I uninstalled BFD about three times and noticed that the uninstall program does not remove all of the files that are placed during install, this was mainly items placed on the windows drive.
Once installed with the latest patch the program was easy to use, operate and get some of the best recoreded drum samples that I have heard, short of standing next to a playing session drummer.

If you have a top notch ADA converter it doesn't get any better that this, unless of course you have a good drummer and a lot of money for mikes. When used with a bass and guitar mixes can sound as dry as a studio or as alive as a good nightclub. With multiple velocity samples and hit's its hard not to find the sound that you are looking for.

After the install hassel described above BFD is worth the price, unless you can spend the money for a live drummer that will listen to everything that YOU want to do. In my search for a programmable drummer I reviewed hardware drum machines (Alesis, Roland) and other VST and DXi programs and BFD offered the sounds that I was looking for. Please keep in mind that this is not a synth and that it has a limited number of sounds (9 gig worth) but taking into account that during a live show your drummer can only accomplish so many things, this program offers a lot of flexability in your home studio.

The BFD from FXpansion - A sort of cross between modelling and sample playback - sample based drums layed out on an environment where one can select mic sources to model a sound in effect - It's totaly dedicated to acoustic drums therefore and the sounds you can get from those given all the huge variations when you start to add-into the equation things like multi-outs and addition fx..... BFD comes with a potentialy huge library of drumkits given the ability to mix and match drums & use 'in-house' room modelling as well as multiple outs for processing a huge variety of additional FX and sounds - We'll have it up and running for some initial review thoughts as soon as we've got the studio DVD drive sorted out - this product comes on a set of DVD to encompass the 9 or 10 gb or so of samples included...

I think it also has multi-outs because in the audio examples (below and on the FXpansion site) there's one demo mixed using 'multi-outs' which has then had s/w compressors, etc and a few other touches added to provide a more 'tech' 'effected' sound - Other audio examples show you can acheive live funky breaks - these examples utiles the various 'fill' strokes you can use with each added drum to add perfectly realistic flourishes & subtle rolls, pre-rolls and roll-on roll-off effects in colusion with velocity control.

You might think a selection of drums from only 6 individual 'kits' is not much, even with the possible permiatations of kit possible, because traditionaly with sample-based drum softs they arrive with a variety of kits. However...

This machine is primarily aimed at reproducing acoustic drum-kit imitations for programming as faithfuly as possible... You get therefore a choice of drumkits to cover all era's and styles historicaly as well as genre-aly cos there's some vintage kits in there too!

BFD takes this palette & faithfuly allows traditional 'room'/realistic drums to be 'modelled' to get drumsounds as far reaching as:

The hardest metal/industrial rock.
Motown & 60's soul (using also some distortion eq's comps & large outboard verbs).
Live & studio jazz breaks.
Classic 'old-vinyl' breaks (if you then rendered the output and added scratch/vinly fx & compression, eq etc).
Cutting edge RnB & Hip-hop real drum sounds.
Heavy drums for techno, drum& nbass and any other style of dance
All commercial applications such as advertising-music imitation cover creations.

If you add this to an analog featured drumbox such as FXPansions own excellent DR008, then you have the best of both worlds

BFD also has a section for adding quantize/feel which pushes drums ahead or behind beat etc - all added together this creates a big variety because a drum-sound is not just the sounds themselves which I think we can say will be fully-covered with BFD, but also the style of the playing, and BFD addresses the ability to imitate styles using these groove facilities, special drum 'stroke' samples and the other effects to model the sound.

BFD is good for 'real drums'/band song-production and other musics' featuring a more 'acoustic' feel can be addressed with ease.

The six kits: each is massively multi-layered and comes with various 'strike' types too - You put together your 'Kit' and can further adjust things like , velocity... You get lower/upper & inside-kik/outisde kik mic adjust controls on the kik and snare.

Add to that the additional 'room' mic's - 'Direct master', 'PZM' & 'Room' each with it's own fader on the MIXER section and also with additional 'width' & 'distance' controls, and you can further adjust the ambient space audio which is all mixed down to the MASTER fader.

If you're into acoustic rock and other drums this looks interesting.