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The Zildjian samples 10” A Custom Splash 14” A Custom Mastersound HH 16” A Custom Crash 14” New Beat HH 18” A Custom Crash 20” A Custom Medium Ride 20” A Custom Crash 20” A Ping Ride 18” A Custom China 21” Rezo Ride 22” China Boy High 20” A Rock Ride 14” A Custom HH 21” A Sweet Ride
First step, after reading the instructions, was to insert DVD1 (that’s Digital Vault Disk). These are software licensed products so there is a procedure to follow to maintain integrity of ownership. It doesn’t have an autorun installer, so you have to manually double-click on the installer icon when the folder opens – full installation of disk 1 took 12 minutes and the process is repeated for disk 2 which took nine minutes. The samples occupied approximately 17GB of hard disk space. The next step was to authorise the licence – this required the creation of an account at the FXpansion website (unless you already have one), input of the Gen16 licence details and validation of the licence within BFD Eco (or the full version of BFD if you already have that). I was fairly thorough doing this and also documented it as I went, so it took about 15 minutes – you do need to be connected to the Internet, although you can perform the licensing on a different computer to the one you use for BFD. So, now I have the BFD Eco screen in front of me with the default template loaded and a heap of Zildjian cymbals arrayed around the kit and viewed from overhead. It is a custom version of BFD Eco which offers a cymbals-only view. There does not appear to be any option to resize the BFD Eco window which is a bit disappointing for those who like a full screen view, but we’re now looking good to start the real business of triggering and only about an hour spent getting to this point – so let’s get on with the fun. 44
Installation of the Bosphorus pack followed a similar process and it took only six minutes to decompress and install the 6GB of samples into the previously created folder. When I opened BFD Eco, it popped up a warning of unlicensed kit pieces and offered to take me to the authorisation page – the process took another four minutes and appeared successful,; however, I could not see the Bosphorus cymbals until I rebuilt the database from the tick menu selector.
The BFD Eco interface The first thing I did was to check the I/O settings via an appropriately labeled radio button on the top left of the BFD Eco Graphical User Interface (GUI) – a few quick selections from the dropdown menus and I had my sound device and MIDI I/O selected. Onboard audio or a higher spec sound device can be used at sample rates between 44,100 and 96,000. The GUI view is split into upper and lower halves: The upper half allows you to select from the three major views (kit, channel and grooves) via radio buttons:The kit view offers two options – just cymbals (up to 11 + HH) or kit + cymbals (5 piece kit with HH, 3 cymbals and 3 assignable auxilliaries); The channel view takes you to the cymbal configuration, equalisation (EQ) and effects (FX) options; The grooves view is a mini-explorer style of screen to allow setup and tracking of grooves and loops, including quantising (time correction) and export functions. Startup preset and help radio buttons plus three dropdown menus with arrow buttons (to save or select presets, kit and mixer settings) complete the top half of the GUI. The lower half is the mixer control with all of the basic mixer functions including: 11 cymbal channels or kit + 3 cymbals and 3 auxiliaries, HH channel, 4 mic channels and Master channel; Fader, pan, auxilliary sends, mute, solo and master assign for each channel; Cymbal modelling controls plus FX power, learn function and offline option; Kit size (MB), mouse-over readout, transport controls, a panic button and time/tempo controls. www.digitaldrummermag.com