User Guide

in a similar principle: it blends between a mic placed on the top of the snare drum,

and another on the bottom. Like the Kick In/Out, it applies only to the Direct bus.

Each Kit-Piece has a Tune parameter. This changes the pitch for each component

globally, through the Direct and ambient buses. The Solo (yellow) and Mute (red) lit

buttons also affect each Kit-Piece globally. The Pan controls vary the stereo place-

ment of each Direct signal within the stereo Direct Master bus - therefore, it has

no effect (in fact, it is greyed out) when using the multi-channel BFD All version

of the plugin, where each Direct Kit-Piece has a dedicated mono output into the

sequencer (more on multi-channel capabilities later). You cannot manipulate the

stereo position of Kit-Pieces in the ambient buses, other than by using the Width

parameter.

There is another type of control in the mixer section: the Dyn (Dynamics) controls.

These increase or decrease the velocity of each incoming MIDI note for each par-

ticular Kit-Piece. Velocity is quite distinct from volume. Each drum-hit in BFD is

recorded at a variety of velocities - i.e. the drums were hit with different degrees

of force. Manipulating the Dyn parameter effectively increases or decreases how

hard the drum is hit, by altering the incoming velocities of the notes used to trigger

them. If you turn down the Dyn parameter on the snare Kit-Piece, for example, you

will hear the snare hits get ‘softer’, an effect quite different from turning down the

volume on a high-velocity hit. Try it! There is also a Master Dyn control, situated just

above the Master level fader (it is unlabelled on the user interface). This alters the

velocity of all incoming notes in a relative manner. The small indicator light under-

neath the Kit-Piece Mute buttons is a visual indicator of the velocity of incoming

MIDI notes for each Kit-Piece.

The mixer section includes a handy preset system, the controls for which are

located above the main level faders. You can load and save mixer settings (.bfm

ﬁles), as well as reset the whole mixer to default settings. If you save your mixer

setups in the BFD/Mixers folder, you can ﬂick through them easily with the

buttons.