I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of FXpansion BFD ECO. BFD ECO is the little brother of the beast BFD2. BFD2 requires it's own dedicated 60 gig hard drive to run, which is a dealbreaker for most people. BFD ECO only requires somewhere in the ballpark of 4 gigs which is much more economical, hence the name ECO.
In my book, FXpansion can do no wrong. Every product they create that I have had the pleasure to use, has been exactly that...a pleasure to use. They create top notch products that are well made as well as add dynamics and professionalism to any home studio.
BFD ECO was easy to install and was fairly easy to register and authorize. I'm still not a fan of any software authorization, I know it's necessary to combat piracy, etc. but it seems like authorization is always the most complicated part of any application install.
As I stated earlier, BFD ECO only took up about 4 gigs of space on my hard drive. This makes it an excellent product to run on a laptop or a modest DAW. In a perfect world, I'd recommend running the full version of BFD2 on your main DAW and throw BFD ECO on your laptop for making beats on the go, that way you'd have the best of both worlds.
Featuring the highlights of the expansive BFD2 library and fully compatible with all BFD2 expansions, BFD ECO provides a simpler way of bringing lifelike drum sounds to your DAW. BFD ECO will be released in April, 2010 and will sell for around $150. BFD ECO will be upgradable to BFD2 at any time for a special upgrade price. BFD ECO comes as RTAS, VST, AU or as a stand alone.
BFD ECO Features:
- 5 kicks
- 6 snares
- 12 toms
- 3 hi-hats
- 11 cymbals and selection of percussion
- Includes jam-blocks, cowbell, cabasa and tambourine
- 15 built-in effects including EQ, filtering, dynamics, drive, reverb and more
- Groove section with over 1500 patterns and advanced humanization
- Customizable keymaps and electronic drum support
- Built-in Stereo audio export
- Mixing section, EQ and dynamics/effect processing
- Overloud's Breverb plate algorithm
- 40 mixed presets and kits in various musical styles like rock, jazz, funk, metal and more
- Mix and match individual kit-pieces to build your own 12-piece kits
- Internal EQ and FX slots on each channel including ambience, aux and master channels
- Integrated mixer includes 2 aux channels for adding extra reverb/parallel compression
- Master output and Direct output for each channel
- Full plugin integration for your digital audio workstation
- Compatible with FXpansion and 3rd-party expansion libraries
- Upgrade path to BFD2
BFD ECO allows you to create the exact drum sound you want by providing dynamic effects processing and a powerful mixing section. Not to mention there are presets that sound excellent right out of the box. BFD ECO also comes with over 1500 drum patterns. You can and drag and drop the patterns into your DAW and create complete songs without having to create your own (time consuming) patterns. All of the patterns sync up with your project and you can add humanization effects to make it feel like a real drummer.
BFD ECO will also do customized keymapping and will work with your electronic drums. You can also combine kit-pieces from different expansion packs. The interface is very simple and straightforward as I was up and creating awesome sounding drum beats in minutes, without any hassle.
FXpansion BFD ECO Requires:
- Windows XP SP3 (32-bit)
- Vista SP1 (32-bit)
- Windows7 (32-bit)
- Pentium4-based CPU or better (Windows)
- OSX 10.5.7 or higher, Intel CPU (Macintosh)
- RAM: 1 GB of RAM
- Hard Drive: 7200 rpm HDD with at least 5 GB of free space
- Other: DVD drive for installation
- Internet connection required for product authorization
I love the fact that I can create realistic, killer sounding drums without annoying my neighbors, wasting valuable studio space with a giant drum kit or having to deal with some flakey drummer dude. Call me anti-social, but I enjoy the idea of creating a full band sound entirely on my own.
FXpansion has done it again! They created a reasonably sized drum program that is affordable, sounds great and is easy to use. I highly recommend checking out BFD ECO when it comes out in April. Perfect for small project studios all the way up to high end professional producers. BFD ECO is a killer drum application for anyone who wants realistic sounding drums and complex patterns without the headache of being a full fledged computer programmer (or actually learning to play, record and mix a real drum kit).
FXpansion BFD ECO is worth every penny, check it out!
