Gary Carey

Not time-limited, no nag screens. Good basic sounds, especially for a free instrument.

It's a player and comes with a very useable acoustic drum kit. There's a variety of presets, which all have an info panel to suggest the genre of music they're best suited to. There are enough options to let you fine tune each kit element and save your tweaked kits as new presets. 

Like most drum VSTs you have a library of groove patterns, I'd say these are mainly useable and not too busy. 

You can purchase additional drum kits and grooves. (I suppose the point of player software is to get you to buy in to their eco-system). Once you have more than just a single kit you're able to mix-and-match elements, swapping the snare drum for example. I already had Addictive Drums 2 but the BFD player was included with my SSL interface bundle so I thought I'd give it a try. And yes, worth installing.

Easy to get to grips with and fast to use. While this doesn't have the bells and whistles of the flagship BFD software there's enough control and tweakability for me. I've got the factory kit plus a Pop Essentials (I think?) expansion and I've used both on demos with pleasing results. CPU load seems quite light, too, though I haven't measured it.  

It's free, why not give it a try. I'm having fun with it.

On 2/21/2024 at 8:45 PM, msmcleod said:

I pretty much always use the plugin browser search nowadays, typing in 3 or 4 characters of the plugin name usually narrows it down to a small enough list for me to spot it and drag it in... and I've got nearly 2000 plugins on one of my machines.

Two thousand! I'm impressed you can remember which one to search for. 🙂

Original post asks if dropping the input level to the master bus is OK. That's what I was saying would be fine, sorry if it wasn't clearly expressed. However, if there's no audible artifacts I don't worry about the visuals.  I lost any nervousness about red lights quite some time ago. 

3 hours ago, John Vere said:

This is wrong. The OP said they were overloading the Master bus. Pulling down the fader does not fix this issue.  If you don't believe me just turn on the Prochannel EQ and you'll see the red light. 

Notice  the red indicator in the EQ and the bypass toggle

. 

If I pull the Fader down it's still overloading the bus

But with the Fader at Unity and now I turn down the input gain that solves the overload issue. 

The Loud Max limiter will easily fix this but it's being fed an overloaded signal so that's not good. Even though I don't EQ my master I often turn it on just for that indicator. I can also then use it like Span for a spectrograph of the frequencies. 

Hi John. 

We're using 32-bit floating point, so the full range audio can be recovered by dropping the fader.  Provided everything is in the box there's no problem.

This YouTube video explains it better than I could: 

If you've not already done it, just full down the Master fader.You won't hurt anything as long as each individual track sounds good.