FXpansion BFD Percussion - Manual (Page 4)

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Using BFD Percussion
Pre-made Kits
All Kit-Pieces on all DVDs must be installed in order to use the pre-made Kit definitions. If
you’re only installing a selection of Kit-Pieces, you need to compile your own Kits from the
installed Kit-Pieces, something which takes a matter of seconds in BFD.
Hit types and Kit-piece types
• The Kit-pieces in BFD Percussion are organized according to the number of Hit types
present.
• The Hit types also differ from those in previous BFD libraries, due to the different and varied
nature of these instruments.
• With the exception of the Hihat slot, Snare slots offer the most Hit types. Instruments with five
Hit types are provided as snares.
• In the case of instruments such as congas, snare slots will be required for a set of two
congas, if you need all the Hit types available for both.
• Bongo sets are classified as toms, and should be loaded into the tom 4, 5 and 6 slots if both
of the two available Hit types are required.
• Most of the other instruments have two Hit types and are classified as kicks, cymbals or
percussion.
• Make sure you know how to use the ‘Type’ drop-down selector in the Kit-piece Selector
panels to enable you to access all the available Kit-pieces. You can load any Kit-piece
into any slot, although the number of Hit types will be reduced if the chosen slot supports
fewer Hit types. For example, loading a Bodhran, which usually has five Hit types, into the
percussion slot will mean that only the first two Hit types can be used. You will also lose the
control over the top and bottom mic channels.
• Read the Kit-piece info displays and the listing in this manual for more specific information
on the instruments, including Kit-piece type categorization, the available Hit types and
differences from usual BFD Hit type conventions.
Using multiple instances of BFD
If you want to simply drop a few percussion sounds into an existing BFD drumkit setup, then
you can use the percussion and extra kick, snare, tom and cymbal slots in the same instance
of BFD.
However, if you are going to require more than the first Hit types for the percussion
instruments, you will need to load a second BFD instance in your host.
Please bear in mind that this can be too resource-intensive for less powerful systems.
The high levels of detail in these sounds can cause significantly higher RAM overhead
compared to the content in the original BFD library, especially when using them alongside
drumkit sounds. When using smaller amounts of RAM (768MB to 1GB), you should either
install BFD Percussion with Small or Medium detail levels (see the Installation guide for
details), or use ‘Max layers’, ‘16-bit mode’ and other settings described in the BFD FAQ for
reducing RAM usage.
More usage tips
Some sounds in BFD Percussion, like the flexatones, waterphones and bowed gongs, are
atmospheric ‘effect’ sounds, intended to be used incidentally rather than rhythmically. It may
not be a good idea to load these into slots referenced by Grooves, although by all means do
experiment! With adjustment of parameters such as the damping settings, you can use these
sounds in many different ways.
Percussion instruments with a lot of high frequency content, like triangles and shakers, sound
more natural through the ambient buses rather than the directs. These types of instruments
are rarely mic’d closely as they can sound too messy and resonant. It can be a good idea to
mute the direct channels for any slots filled with these instruments, using the Output matrix
in the Output Options panel, or by turning down the Direct Trim control for the slot in the BFD
Mixer. Direct channels are still provided, of course, to give you the freedom to use the sounds
in any way you like.
Grooves
BFD Percussion includes a library of Grooves, and presets with which to use them. Please see
the
BFD Percussion Grooves PDF manual on DVD1 for more details.