FXpansion BFD Premium Acoustic Drum Module Mixing with BFD User Manual
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Mixing with BFD
1. Consider how a drummer would play a pattern. Most drummers have hands and
feet: 4 limbs in total. It therefore logically follows that generally, up to 4 things can be
played at any one time. It’s good to watch a few drumming videos (a good source of
these can be found at
) or study some drum scores to get a better
idea of how drum patterns are composed.
. Study a few points of drumming rudiments: things like single and double strokes,
paradiddles, and so on. Understanding how drummers build rhythms is vitally important
in creating realistic drum parts.
3. Try to transcribe the drum parts from your favourite records. If you find it difficult to
program drums that you can hear with your ears, then it’s unreasonable to expect
yourself to program drums that you can only hear ‘in your head’. The more you practice
drum programming techniques, the more skills you will learn. A good way to transcribe
a pattern is to import a looping segment of a song into a track on your sequencer. While
looping the part, program the drum sounds until it sounds right, then mute the loop.
Whatever remains should be a reasonable approximation of the drums.
4. Make good use of the high level of detail in BFD - there are lots of velocity layers
and articulations. When used intelligently, these contribute a lot of realism to your
productions.
5. Another thing to study is the library of BFD Grooves. Even if the patterns in the Groove
library aren’t your cup of tea, you can study them as MIDI parts in your sequencer to
see how a drummer pushes and pulls against the ‘grid’ of hard beat divisions. It’s also
good to look at the velocities, to get a feel for how accenting and velocity variation can
help the feel of a drum pattern.
6. If you like the feel of a Groove or a Fill but not the actual pattern, it’s very easy to move
notes ‘up and down’ in your sequencer’s piano roll or MIDI editor to create new patterns
with minimal effort.
7. Drumming is a very physical activity! It’s good to play something in real time to capture
real spontaneity and groove, instead of using a mouse and a piano roll.
8. A keyboard action is not ideal for drumming, as there is a lot of travel required to trigger
the note. Keyboard mechanisms were designed to move hammers that hit strings, not
to play drum sounds! It’s better to use something more tactile and responsive like a
drum-pad unit (such as the M-Audio Trigger Finger, Korg PadKontrol, Akai MPD-16/4
etc) or an electronic drum kit.