I recently purchased fxpansion's BFD. I am extremely impressed with the results it has been giving me.

BFD ships on 2 DVDs with a comprehensive printed manual. There are about 9 Gigs of drum samples on the DVDs, each drum being multi-sampled at many different velocities.

It appears that BFD will work with just about anything in the way of host apps. It works with the following interfaces: VSTi, DXi, RTAS, AudioUnit and ReWire. The standalone version (included) runs under ASIO on Windows and CoreAudio on OS X.

There are 2 musicians that I regularly record with. I have been using BFD on tracks for them instead of real drums. They are happy with the results and think that they are indistinguishable from real drums.

Sample Sets:

The sample-sets are top notch, all 9 Gigs of them. I have never heard better. They used a good room and a lot of good mics to record them. Further information and pictures of the mics and studio are on their website. All of the samples are 24 bit, although you can run it in 16 bit mode to save on memory and processor.

I've used it on about 18 tracks from Jazz to Metal and I have yet to hear it sound unnatural. There are a large number of different drums to choose from, preset into kits, but allowing you to mix-and-match as you please.

Control:

The controls for BFD are also excellent, allowing you to mix several sets of mics as you please, to get a nice intimate sound, or a full sound with lots of room (and a very nice sounding room it is).

The internal mixer gives you controls for:

• overall velocity - i.e. you can tell the drummer to “play lighter” or “play harder”
• velocity on a per-drum basis - i.e. you can have the snare hit harder
• muting one or more pieces in the kit
• trim volume, tuning and pan for each piece of the kit
• in/out mic adjustment for the bass drum
• bottom/top mic adjustment for the snare drum
• a direct master channel with mute and solo - this is the mix from the direct drum mics
• separate overhead mic, room mic and PZM mic channels with level, solo, mute, mic distance and mic width controls
• master volume

All of these parameters are available for automation by your host software, allowing for ridiculous amounts of control if you are so inclined.

I have been using the stereo version and BFD's own internal mixer. I have found that setup gives me enough control over the sound.

BFD can also provide separate outputs for each drum and set of room mics to your host application so that you can have even further control. This allows you to do things like put more reverb on just the snare.

Grooves:

The grooves that BFD comes with are a respectable collection, and reasonably versatile. I can usually use one of them as a starting point. There are fills to match each of the grooves. Many of the grooves were recorded by top session drummers on a MIDI drum kit.

The groove librarian is well laid out and allows you to set up 2 normal pattern sets and one fill set, all accessible via a MIDI keyboard.

Controls are available for repeat, pattern shuffle and auto-fill every n bars.

BFD can easily be played a MIDI keyboard to add extra cymbal hits, bass and snare hits, etc. where needed. The keyboard is mapped intelligently, and includes nice things like choke keys for the cymbals.

When playing back grooves and other MIDI data, it will humanize slightly. I have found the default setting good for what I am doing, but there are controls for those who need them. It also has a swing control.

Downsides:

BFD takes a long time to load it's samples when you bring up a new song. I have started to use this time to go fetch a beverage and talk to the musicians about what we're going to do. Faster hard drives would help, as they are the bottleneck. I have also given BFD 1 Gig of memory as cache, so it has to transfer 1 Gig of files from disk to memory every time a song loads.

BFD is processor-hungry, and when it runs out of processor, it starts to lose the beat. This is not really much of a problem, freeze or bounce it before recording other tracks and it's all good. I am using a single-processor 1.8 GHz G5, which is the slowest G5 you can get and performance is good enough for me to do the job with minimal adjustments in my workflow.

Conclusions:

One of the best $300 CAD I have ever spent. I get a good versatile drummer who's always around when I need her. I get a top-notch drum room and really good mics operated by good engineers. It integrated easily into my workflow. The defaults are sensible and give you nice results right away. I am getting great results with it. It sounds like a real drummer and real drums.