Fxpansion BFD2 Acoustic Drums Module
Fxpansion BFD2 Acoustic Drum Module is not just a rehash of the same ol', same ol' with a little added flavor. The FXpansion team really took a from-the-ground-up rebuild approach, taking the best features of the previous module and offering it to you with a brand new, simplified GUI and a heaping help of new features.

Using two pairs of room mics, including a mid/side set, the engineers captured the special essence of the legendary AIR Lyndhurst Studios in London. The drumkits were miked with stereo overheads and mono close directs. Every sonic nuance was routed through a custom Neve desk with Air Montserrat preamps and into PrismSound A/D converters, giving you a 55GB library full of hyper-realistic sounds with multiple articulations recorded at up to 96 velocity layers. There's plenty of high-quality instruments and sounds to choose from to create your perfect 10-,18-, or 32-piece kit, from Zildjian and Sabian cymbals to Ludwig and Gretsch kicks and toms, Pearl and DW snares to an Oberheim DX Drum Machine and human group claps.

The ingenious BFD2 interface gives you absolute freedom over tuning, damping, ambience levels, velocity response, and more. You can layer parts of your kit for modern-sounding hybrid productions or easily choose preset kit-piece profiles of dry, damped and other useful settings. More than just pushing buttons on a sampler, BFD2 gives you the flexibility to configure your drum kit like a real drummer. Do you have stereo sample-sets with multiple velocity layers that you'd like to mix? Or previous BFD and 3rd party expansion packs you'd like to keep in your DAW's bag of tricks? Not a problem. BFD2 makes it easy to integrate and import while still letting you utilize its new sound-shaping features.

The accommodating mixing console makes it possible to play realistic cymbal flourishes, powerful kicks and snare lines, convoluted hi-hat parts, ghost notes. If you can think it up, you can blend, route, submix, and process the mic channels as you would in a real-world recording studio with a professional drummer and BFD2 will bring your ideas to life. You can also manipulate bleed levels, change the ambient mic width, and shape your drums into infinite variations through aux sends and patch sidechain effects. The built-in processors have circuit-modelled dynamics, filters, and distortion for creating your punchier sounds, while the effects like Flanger, Bitcrusher, Ring Mod, and Delay showcase the more subtle timbral varieties of this great software.

With 32 outputs, there's plenty of room for bringing in external reverbs and plug-ins you love, but there's also an ample amount of presets created by professional studio veterans to browse through that cover diverse genres. The Groove engine simplifies editing patterns, setting up performance modes, and applying humanization effects to "keep it real" soundwise. More than 5,000 stylistically diverse patterns are ready to add into your productions or you can have even more fun slicing, dicing, and mixing certain elements to make new, customized parts. With BFD2, it's possible to form a full drum track entirely out of a sequence of Grooves.

Some of the new features that previous owners of BFD will find the most beneficial are the powerful, efficient functional enhancements in the Groove engine, like the advanced editor, synced audition previews, and the individual start and end actions for each Groove. There's also improved sorting, searching, and management in the Groove library. Other improvements include a more intuitive keymapping editor, smoother electronic drum setup, universal management of kits and presets, the souped-up internal engine, completely reinvented interface, and new ways of exporting multichannel audio directly from your module.

So whether you want to make breakbeats or backbeats, BFD2 is the answer when rhythm is a dancer.