FXpansion BFD Premium Acoustic Drum Module Mixing with BFD - Manual (Page 10)

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Mixing with BFD www.fxpansion.com
Damping is especially useful in groove-oriented music or songs with a fast tempo:
shortening the decay of the drums can make them punchier and creates more space in
the mix for other elements.
Using the damping controls to a large degree (over 50%) is a much easier alternative to
using gates to achieve similar effects.
• Tightening closed hihats
Damping on hihats is not usually appropriate, although the facility is provided if you would
like to experiment. A more useful tool for hihats is the ‘tighten’ feature. This allows you to
shorten closed hihats without affecting open hat positions. If you don’t use a hihat pedal
controller, set the tighten amount using the ‘default hihat tighten’ parameter in the Hit
Options panel, page 1 tab. When using a hihat pedal controller, the amount of tightening
is variable within the closed position range of MIDI CC values.
2:5. Layering
This technique is widely used in modern production, whereby a sampled snare and kick
are layered over the original drum track’s kicks and snares, doubling them up. The usual
method for this production trick, called ‘drum replacement’, is fairly cumbersome - you
need to isolate the kicks and snares from any bleed in their tracks, and use the transients
to trigger a sampler. When using BFD, it’s far easier.
If you want to layer two BFD snares, load the first as normal and then load another
into the Snare slot (the 8 Bit Kit electronic snares are great for this). In the Kit-Piece
Inspector for Snare1, use the ‘Link to Kit-Piece’ drop-down menu to link Snare1 to
Snare. This results in Snare being triggered whenever Snare1 is triggered.
If you want a really heavy drum replacement effect, restrict the velocity range for Snare
using the Advanced tab of the Hit Options panel by setting VelLo and VelHi to the same
value. Also, turn off randomization (set VRnd to 0%) and use the VA parameter at 100%
to make the volume scale with velocity. This will result in exactly the same velocity layer
sample being played each time, with the amplitude depending on the velocity of the MIDI
note triggering it.
There is a lot of room for creativity here - you can use different amounts of ambience and
damping for each snare, and use the tuning and snare top/bottom controls to adjust the
sound further. You can use exactly the same methods on kicks to make them huge with
thunderous low-end. It’s also great for designing interesting or experimental kits.
If you want to use a sample that isn’t in BFD, simply load up the sample into any sampler
plugin and copy the relevant MIDI notes to a new track so that they trigger the sampler at
the same time. Feel free to use whatever sounds you want, whether they’re acoustic or
synthetic. Even triggering a bit of vinyl noise can create interesting results.