FXpansion’s BFD3 is a tremendously powerful virtual drum kit, really its a full studio based around drum samples. With BFD3 you not only get a load of great drum samples and drum grooves, but you have full control over the mix, effects and mic placement for the kits.

BFD3 also has the ability to add on additional sample packs and groove packs. There’s a lot of great content out there for BFD3, and the sound quality is amazing.

With the release of the new 16 inch MacBook Pro in 2019 a lot of music producers who wanted a new laptop found themselves in a bit of a bind (myself included). Catalina was the OS that the MacBook was released with, and that OS notoriously broke a lot of software. I won’t get into the details as to why and how, but a lot of music production software vendors had to scramble to get updates in place to handle computers running the Catalina OS.

FXpansion was one of those hit by issues running on Catalina, and BFD3 seemed to be particularly vexing to get to work with Catalina. Those of us who use BFD3 have been waiting for a while for an update, so when they released a Catalina compatible version this week I jumped right on it.

After I downloaded and installed the software BFD3 ran a scan on my user content (something that the security in Catalina made prohibitive),which it did with no issue, and I was able to start using it right away. Everything loaded and played correctly, and it sounded as great as ever.

Very happy that BFD3 is functional again on my new MacBook Pro. Can’t wait to dig in and start programming some drums with this awesome software.

I’ll keep this blog post updated if I run into issues, but so far so good!