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The focus in BFD Eco is on getting quick, easy results.

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If you're serious about in-the-box drum production, virtual instruments such as FXpansion's BFD2 and Toontrack's Superior Drummer 2.0 deliver the goods. But for many of us, their complexity and large hard drive footprint can be a turn-off.

With this in mind, FXpansion has taken some of the best parts of BFD2 and moulded them into a simmered down, more affordable package: BFD Eco.

In this case, Eco means economy, so you get fewer drums, cymbals and features, and the quality of the library has been reduced to 16-bit. This results in a compact 5GB drive footprint. However, you're still looking at a 12-piece setup consisting of kick, snare, hi-hat, three toms, three cymbals and three percussion elements. With up to 24 velocity layers per piece, realism and playability haven't been forsaken.

In detail

BFD Eco uses the same playback engine as BFD2, but with a stripped-back interface, comprising the mixer in the lower half and one of three selectable displays at the top. The Kit view shows a drum set graphic where clicking on pieces gives a fixed-velocity audition. The Channel display covers each mixer channel's settings, including built-in effects (EQ and two others of your choice) and further options via an inspector panel.

Inspector settings are available for all channels (except auxiliary and master) and include tuning, send levels (two auxiliaries, ambience and overhead), damping and various piece-specific options such as top/bottom balance for the snare, in/out balance for the kick and width/distance for the ambience channels.

Eco's Grooves page combines a MIDI groove browser, with a simple single-track drum sequencer. Like most drum instruments, you can use this to choose grooves from the library, then drag-and-drop them as MIDI data into your host. Alternatively, you can add grooves to the built-in drum track, creating a preset-based sequence within Eco. Note that when doing this, you can't modify the MIDI on a note-by-note basis, although you can trim, drag, copy and paste the patterns.

Finally, it's possible to select a single groove in the browser and have Eco play it in sync with your host (single mode), and this is good if you fancy spinning through some patterns with your DAW track playing.

So far, so good, but beyond this, you also get four 'groove effects': Quantize, Humanize, Simplify and Swing. These enable you to quickly adjust the grooves, and if you drag-and-drop the effected grooves into your host, the MIDI data is modified accordingly. We found this great for quickly piecing together variations on drum parts.