FXpansion BFD Supplemental - Manual (Page 16)

4
USING BFD WITH ELECTRONIC DRUMS
BFD 1.5 contains several new features in order to improve performance with electronic
drumkits. In particular, hihat and cymbal choke control is substantially improved. We have
included pre-made presets for the most popular drum brains. However, if you have a
different e-drum system, or if you’d like to understand the process better, this guide is for
you!
It is essential that you are comfortable with the way in which the Hit Options panel
operates before you explore this guide: please read chapter 7 of the reference manual
thoroughly.
A note about latency
When you are playing BFD with e-drums, it is important to be aware that BFD is unlikely
to respond as quickly as any onboard sounds on the drum brain. This is because of
several factors:
• Soundcard latency/buffer size
• Any latency and timing inaccuracies as a result of connect the drum brain MIDI output
the drum brain MIDI output
to the computer MIDI interface.
• Any latency involved in getting the data from the MIDI interface to BFD (USB MIDI
interfaces, for example, can have much larger latency than PCI or serial interfaces).
Nevertheless, if you are serious about drumming with BFD, you can assemble a system
which can get down to very playable low latencies. Soundcards such as those by RME
can deliver latencies as low as 1.5ms. If you also use a good MIDI interface, you can get
a very realistic and immediate response by playing BFD with e-drums.
However, it may be best on some systems to record your performance while monitoring
the sounds on your drum brain, and then route the recorded MIDI to BFD afterwards.
E-Drum features not supported by BFD
BFD’s samples are generally not recorded being struck in different positions (do not
confuse this with hihat positions between open and closed), although some rides have
bell and normal hit samples. Therefore, any positional control offered by your e-drums will
not have any effect in BFD.
For example, some Roland V-Drums systems send out positional information as MIDI
continuous controllers. In fact, the MIDI CCs sent out by V-Drums brains can be quite
problematic with the default MIDI CC layout in BFD. Please see the section below entitled
‘MIDI CCs’ for more details.
Some e-drum kits offer 3 positions for ride cymbals. With these, you will need to map 2 of
the positions to the same Hit type, as BFD’s rides are limited to hit and bell.