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Having spent a fair bit of time last year working through the BFD3 library, the point it came to life for me was when I got a feel for which shells and cymbals were recorded in the same spaces and had overlapping room/ distant mic options. Then I spent a couple of hours building a kit template of my own, paying really close attention in the mixer to how the overheads, rooms, "amb" mics and other available distant mics presented the whole kit sound on their respective channels.
Sometimes that's a bit of a faff in the software as it is at the moment, because if you want to balance the whole kit's sound coming through, say, the room mic channel, you need to go into each kit component piece by piece and adjust its individual volume in a sub menu off to the right. But, it really made the kit sound gel when I got those tracks well balanced.
I actually don't use the cymbal close mics at all, except for the occasional hi hat or maybe to give a ride definition in a chorus, because I don't work in really aggressive/dense musical styles and don't use close cymbal mics when I record real drums. In fact, it was my experience of recording real drums that gave me the understanding of how the balance of the drums is presented when you track "drum overheads", "drum room" etc, and once I got them sounding right in my template, I could just go forward as if it were a real audio recording of a performance, albeit one where I could go back and adjust the playing. I know Drew and Nerine are both well experienced in that regard. I guess for a user who'd never tracked drums before, the interface would suggest that you get a kit balance with the individual close shell and cymbal mics, then use the oh/amb options just for some depth/ cohesion.
Bandcamp
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I love feedback like this! Helps me make my cases for the next version. Keep 'em coming!
I'm not saying BFD is bad by any means. And it's likely it has been updated since I last used it.
I did think the shells on BFD3 sounded better than SD2.
For my needs, and the sounds I go for, I find SD3 just works better for my use case.
I usually find the weak link to be the overheads/cymbals in a lot of these programs.
SD3 seems to have sorted that all out and they are the most natural I have used. I know @WiresDreamDisasters works on the BFD stuff, so I'm certainly not going to ruffle any feathers there. Kudos where it's due! I'd absolutely love to be involved in projects like that as my day job.
I dare say a new version is on the horizon at some point, and SD3 is the most recent large release of a drum VI, so it's likely BFD4 will take the lead when it happens, as we usually seem to have a leapfrogging effect with all this stuff.
IF BFD4 (I've made that name up) is excellent and I find it sounds better than SD3, I'll use that. Simple. But for right now, SD3 gets an awful lot right and I can't really fault the library or how realistic it can be made to sound with quite little effort.
This next part could possibly be looked at or incorporated or considered.
One gripe I do have with SD3. When changing a entire kit, it seems like a lot of the velocity programming needs to be entirely redone or massaged quite a lot. Some kit pieces seems to react to different velocities much more severely than you'd expect.
What is nice ghosting on one snare may be quite hard hits on another, which entirely loses the feel of the performance.
If there is a way to scale that effectively between different kit pieces of the same type it would be an excellent addition, and would make auditioning new kits much less hassle.
I guess essentially making the sample layers within each velocity window more consistent/evenly matched over the different kit pieces would be the solution.
It does have limitations - you can't choose to mix toms and high-hat in a section, and it doesn't do anything like blastbeats - but it's fabulous for creating convincing ideas and cool patterings to play with.
https://www.toontrack.com/product/ezdrummer-2/
If I were making an electronic track most of the component parts would ahve their own DAW lane and FX anyway.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
very different approach, in that it uses synthesis to generate the drum sounds, and has an incredibly complex level of customisation.
Each drum has options for heads, hardware, hit area etc etc.
I watched a video on it, and was amazed at the level of tunability, the sounds are then processed as usual in a DAW, which is where most of the magic happens anyway.
I think it was about £300 at the time, and they also do a Bass, I already have all my sounds set up, but it did look like a good way to create a more unique sound, instead of relying on the usual suspects, and the same samples as everybody else.