VQ Drums User s Guide

Transcription

1 VQ Drums User s Guide

2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction Installation The Kit The articulations The mapping The Interface Main Mixer Effects Settings Articulation Menu Velocity Curve Bleed Sub Kick and Snare Noise The Presets Final words and credits License Agreement License Grant: Rights: : Refunds: Terms:... 15

3 1. Introduction VQ Drums' stands for Vintage Quality Drums. It's a sample library for NI Kontakt and above. It features a 1964 Ludwig Hollywood drum kit recorded with 12 mics in a dry wooden studio. All recorded with 6 velocity layers and 6 round robin, resulting in 36 samples per articulation. All samples normalized to 0db so when a velocity ramp is applied it results in 128 volume steps, which gives a very natural response from the keyboard or e-drum. This is, by far, the most complex library that I've ever done and it's also the best sounding kit that I've ever heard. It features a great sounding vintage drum kit recorded with great sounding mics and preamps in a great sounding studio with state of the art scripting implementing pioneer features. It's really hard to get it better. And these are not hype nonsense marketing words. Keep reading and you'll see what I mean. 7.5GB of content compressed to about 4GB using NI's NCW compression. 2. Installation This library is not "Powered by Kontakt", this means that: - You need the full version of Kontakt or above (Kontakt 5) to load it without restriction. Kontakt Player will run in demo mode and you'll have to restart it every 15 minutes of use. - The "Add Library" function is not available. For installing you have to take care of not moving any of the files or folders inside or outside the main one. When you want to move the library to any location in your hard drive you have to move the main folder with everything in it, otherwise Kontakt won't find the samples or resources. You can load the library using one of these three methods: 1. Double click on the nki files. 2. Drag and drop the nki file right into the interface. 3. Use Kontakt's built in browser and either drag and drop or double click on it.

4 3. The Kit This is a Ludwig Hollywood kit (a complete Superclassic with one extra tom) from 1964 with these sizes: - 22" kick drum. - 12" rack tom. - 13" mid tom. - 16" floor tom. We've sampled 2 snares: - WFL Buddy Rich from Ludwig Supersensitive 14x6.5 from Hi Hat and cymbals "Constantinople". 2 crash cymbals, 1 china and 1 splash from the 1920s. 2 rides: - Zildjian K from 1940s. - Constantinople 22". Played with Jason Bonham signature sticks. 4. The articulations We always want to get the maximum realism out of any sample library, so the round robin (repetitions to avoid the machine gun effect) are important, the number of velocity layers and accuracy when sampling them are crucial, but the articulations and how you play them are very important too... specially the hi hat. So, here you have a complete list of the articulations used in the VQ Drums. Although we only sampled one kick, we played it using two different beaters, a plastic beater with a very focused and modern sound, and the original felt beater from 1964 which gives a warm, vintage sound (and some noises too!). Kick: plastic and felt beaters. Snare: normal hit, cross stick and rimshot. Toms: normal hit. Hi Hat: close, medium1, medium2 and fully opened. All of them with side and top hits for emulating the pattern that some (good) drummers do. Opening and closing articulations too. Ride: normal hit, bell and side (like a crash). Cymbals (rest): normal hit.

5 5. The mapping *Click the keyboard icon on the top bar if you don't see Kontakt's keyboard. The black keys mean that there are no sounds or funcionalities mapped to them. The kit comes with a default mapping (although you can change it to whatever you want, see the Interface - Settings section) that follows the standard General Midi mapping. The yellow keys are the cymbal-stops. When played they muffle a certain cymbal: - F: crash 1. - G: crash 2. - A: china. - B: splash. There is one green key, G-1. Everytime you press that key the round robin (repetition) counter will be reset to 0. This is done to make sure that every take sounds exactly the same everytime the song is played. It s a good idea to record this key on the start of the session so everytime the same samples are triggered. Note: the green and yellow keys can't be remapped.

6 6. The Interface 6.1. Main This is the main view. Here you can see a representation of the drum kit modeled and rendered in 3D (yes, I know it reminds a lot of a very famous drum software, but I love it!). In this tab you can change the kick beater, the snare and the ride by clicking on the little white arrows that you'll see below each part of the drum kit. Yes, they are a bit hard to see but there they are :) Once clicked on any of the arrows a menu will pop up for you to select the type of drum or articulation you want. *Click on the radio button, not on the labels, or you'll close the panel. ** To close the panel, click on it or open another panel.

7 6.2 Mixer Here you have a complete mixer with 10 channels where you can load/purge, control pan, volume, mute, solo and select the output of each microphone. First, using the orange lights from the top you can load (light on) or purge (light off) the samples from each microphone. Why is this useful? To save RAM usage. In a large session is very handy being able to save some space in the memory. If you have one or more microphones that you don't want to use simple purge them (turn the light off). Then comes the pan knob where you can modify the panorama from left to right of each microphone, this works as any mixer and any DAW. Same for the volume fader, going from -inf (muted) to +12dB. The middle position is the 0dB value. You'll see the actual volume of the channel in the yellow label below it. The mute and solo buttons work as any DAW or mixer, with the difference that when you hit the mute button the fader goes down to -inf. And when you press the solo button all the other faders go down to -inf (except if they are in solo mode too). When you unmute or unsolo the channels everything *should* be set back to whatever value they were. The grey "default" menu is the output selector. There you can assign a different Kontakt output for each microphone to have separate outputs in your DAW or audio interface. For that you'll have to configure Kontakt outputs first, then restart Kontakt and the list of the available outputs will appear on the list.

8 6.3 Effects Did I tell you that the VQ Drums is the most versatile drum library ever? We've included 3 effects to sculpt the sound of each microphone to make it sound the way you want easily and quickly. You have three compressors: classic, enhanced and pro, an EQ with 3 bands, gain, resonance (or Q) and frequency, and a convolution reverb with 30 custom impulses from halls, plate reverbs and rooms. First things first. On the top you can see a row of buttons for each microphone + a master button and a switch. When you tweak the compressor, reverb or eq parameters you are only affecting the microphones that are turned on. This is a method that we've come up with for being able to tweak each microphone separately, all at once or just some of the microphones at a time. The Multi - Single switch defines if you want to affect one channel or multiple channels. In other words, when it's set to "Single", every time you press a button it will be "soloed" meaning that you'll only be able to modify one microphone at a time. If the switch is set to "Multi" you'll be able to select multiple channels at once. In order to use the effects you'll have to turn them on by clicking on the green switch you'll find attached to the name of the effect. When green, the effect is on. When grey, the effect is off. The convolution reverb is only available in the master channel. When you select any other channel it will be blurred out. That's because you can't have the convolution effect loaded at a group level, but only at a instrument level. It's a Kontakt thing...

9 6.4 Settings In this tab you can control the individual tune, volume, envelope and mapping of each articulation separately, control the velocity curve (or how the library reacts to the incoming midi velocities), control the bleeding and add subharmonic frequencies to the kick drum and filtered white noise to the snare to enhance their sound Articulation Menu Select any an articulation from the menu. When you do it you'll see that the knobs and sliders in this section will be updated to display the proper values. Imagine that I want to lower the tune of the snare and maybe raise a little bit its volume and make it sound more tight. Then I would select the snare from the menu (mind if you have the WFL or Ludwig snare loaded). Then I would turn down the "tune" knob the amount of semitones that I want, turn up the volume knob and adjust the "hold" and "decay" sliders to match what I have in mind. This won't affect the other articulations or mic values, including the cross stick and snare rimshot, so each articulation must be modified individually. *If you want to modify the entire list of articulations at once (to control the attack, for example) you can do it by pressing the ALT key while you modify the parameter. The remapping function is pretty straight forward. You can see two little black boxes displaying the current note where the articulation is mapped to. You can modify the key by clicking on the small arrows that will be displayed when the mouse is above the box, or you can drag and drop as if it was a slider or, alternatively, you can double click to type the value directly.

10 Then, the articulation will be automatically mapped to the new key that you entered, and the Kontakt's keyboard colours will be updated. If two or more articulations are mapped to the same key, it will be coloured in red, meaning that there is something wrong. *There can't be two or more articulations mapped at the same key, so make sure that you don't have any red keys or the kit won't play as it should since only one articulation will be heard Velocity Curve Here you can control how the library processes the incoming midi velocities. This is done to match your playing style and/or your keyboard or e-drum sensitivity. The midi velocities go from 0 to 127, so there are 128 possible values. 0 is the lowest velocity and 127 is the highest velocity. The Min knob controls the minimum possible value. If you turn it up to 64, the minimum possible value will be 64 so, basically, there won't be low velocities played. Same for the maximum knob but for the maximum values. This follows this piece of code: if (velocity < min) { velocity = min } else if (velocity > max) { velocity = max } The curve knob doesn't change the minimum and maximum values, but it smoothly curves between those points with a logarithmic shape (positive value) or an exponential shape (negative values). If set to 0, the shape is linear and the velocity value remains untouched Bleed This is a very special feature to help control the sound. First of all, what's bleeding in an audio recording? When recording a drum kit with multiple mics, what is done is that you put one mic on a dedicated part of the instrument. For example, one mic for the kick, one mic for the snare, one mic for the hi hat, etc. The thing is that the sound of the snare can also be heard on the kick mic. That's the bleeding. Bleeding is the sound leaked from other parts of the drum kit into a microphone. In order to keep a focused sound and avoid bleeding in a live recording situation engineers put gates on each microphone that reacts at a certain threshold to let the sound pass through and then follows an envelope to close the gate again. That way the microphone only "works" when you hit that part of the drum kit.

11 The thing is that the bleeding makes it sound more real in a sample library situation. We included all the recordings of every microphone, that's why this library sounds so real. Through the microphone of the kick you can hear all the other parts of the drum kit too. The "mic bleed" knob sets the amount of db of the bleeding groups. You can turn down the knob to -inf and you'll only get the sound of the dedicated microphones. For example, the kick will only sound through the kick drum mic, the snare will only come from the snare drum mic and so on. Except for the room mics. When set to 0dB you get the real sound of the recording, but you can even exagerate it turning it up to +6dB. Some bleeding is necessary, but there is a special bleeding that is really annoying and it's the toms bleeding. Tom heads tend to make the mix sound really muddy because of the low ringing sound that is captured when playing specially the kick and the snare. So we added a simple "Tom Bleed" switch to turn it on and off. When turned off, the microphone of the toms will only capture the tom sound and nothing else. When turned on you'll get the sound of the other parts of the drum kit too, depeding on the "mic bleed" knob. Same for the "OH bleed". When turned off, you'll only get the sound of the cymbals through the overhead mics. When turned on you'll get the sound of the rest of the drum kit too, based on the value of the "mic bleed" knob. These switches will load and purge the corresponding bleeding groups from memory Sub Kick and Snare Noise This is a pioneer feature in drum libraries. There is a technique when mixing drums that consists in adding a subharmonic sine oscillator to the kick. It's quite tricky to do because it involves having a sine oscillator controlled by a gate that is controlled by the kick track via sidechain. We have included it so it's easy to use. You only have to raise the volume slider to start hearing it. Then, you can tune the sine using two methods: note or frequency. When the switch is on "note" mode you'll see that the little black box displays a note that you can edit by clicking on the little white arrows, drag within the box bounds or double click to type the value directly. The tuning will be calculated behind the scenes by the script. We've tuned it by default to "G#1", that is the tune of the kick drum. A good method would be to tune it to the key of your song or track. When the switch is on frequency you'll be able to change the tune using a frequency value in Hz. You can go down to 20hz and up to 700hz. It's better to keep it between 20hz and 200hz, but you also have the option to go higher.

12 Then you have the envelope where you can control the attack, hold and decay times. It's better to set a minimum of 10ms for the attack or you'll hear a little click that will be distracting because the real kick already has that transient information. This is done to give richness to the low end of the kick and get a fuller sound that doesn't sound overprocessed. The snare noise follows the same principle as the sub-harmonic kick, but uses white noise when the snare is played instead, and it helps giving more attack, presence and sustain. This white noise can be filtered using low pass and high pass filters with 2 selectable poles per filter: 1 pole and 4 poles. To see the difference between each pole you can take a look and this graphic: Every parameter value is displayed in the messages bar: Command+Click (Mac) or Control+Click (Windows) on any control resets the parameter to its original value.

13 7. The Presets There are artist presets included in the library. You can find them in the very well named "Arist Presets" folder. There you'll see 4 names: - David Hurst. - Dan Zank. - Tapsa Kuusniemi. - Jesus Ginard (hey, that's me!). They kindly sent me these presets for all of you to use and they are very different with each other, showing how versatile this library is! You may hear some effects that are not available in the GUI, like the bit crusher. That's because they added it themselves by entering inside the library clicking the wrench icon. It is not recommended to do this because there are some tricks to get rid of some unwanted noises and hiss (filters following an envelope) that you can override unintentionally. So, if you want to add custom effects it's better to do it only at an instrument level (both insert or send) or to use external effects in your DAW. If you don't know what I'm talking about it's better to not click the wrench icon and only use the provided features (that are quite a few :) and use external effects. Some of the presets are only available for Kontakt 5 and above (yes, I know that there is no Kontakt 6 yet, but they will be compatible). The ones provided by me and some of the provided by Tapsa Kuusniemi are available for Kontakt 4 too (and above, obviously). I want to expand the list of presets continously. So, if you want to collaborate, you only have to re-save the patch that you modified with a different name than "VQ Drums" (the cooler the better) and when you have a minimum of 8 to 10 presets you can pack them all in a zip file and send it to info@wavesfactory.com. I'll do regular updates as soon as I have new presets for everybody to use. It would be better if you can do the presets in Kontakt 4 so more people will be able to load them, but if you only have Kontakt 5 there's no problem!

14 8. Final words and credits Thank you for purchasing "VQ Drums". I have put a lot of effort and work in it and I think the result speaks for itself. I hope you like the library as much as I do and it becomes your "go-to" for drum tracks. Recording: Juanjo Tur at Phonos. Editing, programming and script: Jesús Ginard. Design: John Gordon (vstyler). Produced by Wavesfactory. Ludwig, Zildjian and WFL and/or any logos that may appear on the design are trademarks of their respective owners. Thank you!

15 7. License Agreement By installing any Wavesfactory product you accept the following product license agreement: 1. License Grant: The license for this product is granted only to a single user. All sounds and samples in this product are licensed, but not sold, to you by Wavesfactory for commercial and non-commercial use in music, sound-effect, audio/video postproduction, performance, broadcast or similar finished content-creation and production use. Wavesfactory allows you to use any of the sounds and samples in the library(s) youõve purchased for commercial recordings, mixing and film/tv/game audio production without paying any additional license fees or providing source attribution to Wavesfactory. This license expressly forbids any unauthorized inclusion of content contained within this library, or any any Wavesfactory library, into any other sample instrument or library of any kind, without our prior express written consent. This license also forbids any re-distribution method of this product, or its sounds, through any means, including but not limited to, resampling, mixing, processing, isolating, or embedding into software or hardware of any kind, for the purpose of re-recording or reproduction as part of any free or commercial library of musical and/or sound effect samples and/or articulations, or any form of musical sample or sound effect sample playback system or device. Licenses cannot be transferred to another entity, without written consent of Wavesfactory. 2. Rights: Wavesfactory retains full copyright privileges and complete ownership of all recorded sounds, instrument programming, documentation and musical performances included in this product. 3: Refunds: Downloaded libraries can't be returned, so we can't provide refunds. 4. Terms: This license agreement is effective from the moment the product is installed by any means.the license will remain in full effect until termination.