The final word on BFD

hi, well I'm now at the juncture in my journey which it seems some of you have survived. Namely, I need a surrogate drummer and so far BFD is  edging out. However, there seem to be issues. It seems that outputs from BFD can be routed to AA via Rewire but I don't get how a song worth of drum/percussion parts is triggered i.e. since in AA, Rewire sessions midi input to the slave plugin is not available and there seems to be no way of designating drum pattern sequences internally in BFD. Anyhow , I now have Reaper in the picture, hopefully that will handle BFD perfectly and I'll just later transfer the drum parts as wav files into AA. I hope I don't have to get into purchasing Cubase just to use BFD.

I found some posts that are over a year old on this issue. I was hoping that a year later of you all thinking and playing with virtual drumkits there may be some wonderful advise to share. BFD is a decent investment especially considering that I will have to fairly soon purchase the percussion expansion pack, so am I going down the right track? Are Groove Agent or Stylus RMX better especially for  a Reaper / AA combination?

Any advise at all on this general subject is greatly appreciated.

thanks

Hi there,

Only just saw this post so.....

I am still happily using BFD after a good long time. It has been a steep learning curve and I am still not at the top, there is so much to learn and try, but I love the sounds I can get from the different kits.

I haven't used Reaper, but after a quick glance at the web site I see it supports midi and vst plugins. I use Sonar 6, but I guess it does the same thing.

I generate my drum tracks in Jammer Pro then export the midi (type0) file into Sonar (it needs to be type 0 for BFD. Then I load up BFD ALL this gives me all the direct tracks plus three ambient tracks a total of 14 tracks. I assign the midi track output to the BDF All input.
The mapping between Jammer and BFD is not perfect so I have to move some of the tracks up or down to fit with BFD.
Then I load up a kit and start swapping bits of kit until I get the sounds I want I also add, remove individual notes.
Then I select everything and export 14 mono audio tracks which I then open in AA.
I save the final setup because I always have to do this bit a few times until I am happy with the result.

I have tried Groove Agent and Stylus RMX, but I think Stylus is only really good for electronic music. I never got on with Groove Agent as you are dependent on its grooves, so I am sticking with BFD.

I will offer any assistance I can if you run into problems - I have become quite good at it, and FXPansion have been good in sorting problems out as well.

The expansion packs are great, full of good stuff (except the 8 bit kit which I think is rubbish) I just wish I could afford them all!

hey Mark,

just saw this post just now and thanks for your generous offer which I'm afraid I may have to take you up on.

It seems that my workflow would be very similar to yours. Instead of Jammer I have been playing with Band in the Box and instead of Sonar I have been using Reaper for its VSTi support which as we all know AA does not have.

so let me gather some of my thoughts together and hopefully your help will get me past some of the bumps in the road so that I can get back to composing music and dropping tracks.

thanks