Wizoo Darbuka Vst Free Download
Anastacia Iacono
This pair of plug-in instruments from long-standing sound designers and sample-library creators Wizoo (the team behind Steinberg's Hypersonic virtual instrument) take the concept a little further. If instrumental sample collections can be packaged with plug-in front-ends, why not loops of rhythmic material? Such is the rationale behind Darbuka and Latigo, two 'virtual percussionist' instruments that offer users the sounds and performances of the Middle East and Latin and Central America respectively, in surround sound if you wish.
Neither Darbuka nor Latigo allow direct access to individual percussion hits, although of course you could resample them if you wanted to. At their collective hearts are large collections (1GB for Latigo and 2GB for Darbuka) of themed percussion performances featuring instruments typical of their genre, played by experts in their field. It's rather as if a group of the most patient (and cheap!) session percussionists were living on your hard drive. A healthy selection of typical styles is available, with individual instrument patterns that can be triggered solo or en masse, complete with variations, intros, fills and other extra material. And of course it all integrates simply into your host sequencer.
Providing access to the sampled performances in both of these plug-ins, and allowing users to manipulate them and inject something of their own personality is Wizoo's new Flexgroove virtual-instrument engine, a technological development which is apparently planned for use in more Wizoo libraries. As you might expect, both libraries allow you to play back their looped performances at any tempo while sync'ed to a host sequencer (triggering via an attached MIDI keyboard or on-screen with a mouse), but Flexgroove goes further than that. You can customise the final arrangement, loosen or tighten a performance with timing effects, quantise performances, adjust Complexity (which makes a sampled performance more or less busy) and freely set level and pan for all instruments. And all this is done via an intuitive graphical front end.
Despite the different performance loops in these instruments and the different overall musical styles, these two plug-ins are conceptually and operationally identical, so be aware that my comments on usage apply to both Darbuka and Latigo unless otherwise stated.
The collection's name is also the name of one of the drums being played: it's a single-headed, waisted, hollow hand drum played with both hands that's found all over the Middle East. Also in the set is the 'douhola', a kind of bass darbuka. 'Bendir' and 'riqq' are both circular hand-held frame drums, the latter being rather like a small tambourine. Finger cymbals are an effective part of the mix: the small ones are called 'sagat', the larger 'tura'. The collection also features, rather less exotically, bongos and shaker. They need no introduction to SOS readers, but fit well with the rest of the ensemble. A reversed darbuka or douhola hit also appears in some styles.
Multiple Grooves/Parts set to trigger simultaneously from one MIDI event form a Pattern, and each Style can contain Patterns triggered by each MIDI note in a five-octave range. Keeping it simple, a Pattern could contain just one Part, say a kick-drum performance. Equally, it could contain several Parts: a combination of kick, snare and hi-hat Grooves played from one key as a Pattern.
When you fire up Darbuka or Latigo, the first screen you see is the Play window. There are three main windows in total, although each one has four common elements, namely a Style/Pattern name display (of which more in a moment), a five-octave pattern trigger mini-keyboard, the master volume control, and a switch labelled 'XXL'. All samples within the plug-ins are provided in two formats, either RAM-intensive full-bandwidth samples or more economic examples treated with lossless data compression, and the XXL switch makes the choice between the two. In practice, I could discern no audible difference between them, and the software defaults to loading the compressed samples.
The vertical Style/Pattern list on the right is also visible in all three operating windows. Initially, the Patterns will all be related, producing rhythmic elements that belong to the selected Style, but you're free to collect Patterns from different Styles and assemble them into new Styles, to edit their playback settings and save them for future exploitation. Styles are loaded and saved via the display immediately below this part of the window.
When you access the Play window, a row of eight percussion 'tracks' appears at the bottom, which fill up with percussion icons when a Style is loaded. Each icon relates to a particular drum, and you gradually become familiar with them as you work with the plug-ins. In this window, each track has a Mute and Solo button plus a level meter, but clicking on the name brings up the Mix page, of which more later in this review. If a Style has more than eight 'tracks' (there can be up to 14, remember), the row can be scrolled left or right as required.
Other master processors accessed on the Play page include 'dynamics' and a two-band EQ. The former, a kind of preset adaptive compressor, is even simpler than the Ambience processor, offering just fast, tight or slow responses, and a single control, confusingly labelled 'Density'.
Master pattern-playback parameters are also located at the top of the Play page (although individual patterns can be altered in the Edit window to have their own offsets to the values entered here). These playback parameters are where Flexgroove really comes into its own. First of all, there's a Speed control. Both plug-ins can sync to themselves, running at the nominal tempos of the selected Style or Patterns, or have everything sync to the host application. Leaving the plug-ins to run together at their own tempo can lead to some interesting polyrhythmic results! But whether sync'ed to the host or not, the Speed control lets Darbuka or Latigo play at double or half the overall tempo, which is great for those moments when plug-in tempo and host sequencer tempos are so far apart that the feel is suffering.
The next playback parameter is Variance, which, as its name suggests, adds variations to patterns within a Style by borrowing hits from other Patterns. The resulting extra complexity can be subtle, but completely in keeping with the current Style.
If Variance is an odd parameter for what is essentially loop-playing software, then Complexity, accessed via a three-position slider, goes even further. The three levels (Low, Mid and Max) determine how 'busy' the Patterns in a Style will be. Imagine being able to ask a session percussionist to just lay back a bit and take it easy: that's what this parameter does. Even if a pattern is incredibly busy, the simplified version resulting from a reduction of the Complexity parameter still makes musical sense, and preserves the 'feel' of the original performance.
And that's not quite all: a more or less standard drum kit is also part of the sonic signature of this music. A kick drum, snare, sidestick, sticks, hi-hat, toms, and crash cymbal usually play together in some combination or other, but can indivudally be solo'd or muted out of a mix.
Nor is the vertical axis hard-assigned to level: it can adjust no parameter at all, be set to alter the send level to the Ambience processor, or alter front/rear balance (when using the applications' surround options). Another option, Room Mode, uses both X and Y coordinates to control level, pan, rear balance and the Ambience send simultaneously to more realistically place individual instruments in a space; again, though, this works best in surround mixing environments. The instruments then move around an imaginary listener placed at the centre of the stage.
The Mix page (here from Darbuka) illustrates the excellent Stage graphic, here set to offer draggable control over pan and level. The shaded drum (a bendir) is muted in the track list below. Note also the individual track parameters; the ones here are those for the selected douhola.
The Track selectors echo those visible in the Play window (eight are visible, as in the other page), but the main part of this lower display is taken up with Track-specific parameters. First in line is a three-band EQ, edited directly via a displayed EQ curve. Clicking and dragging three 'handles' alters frequency and gain; the mid band even has a controllable Q parameter. In all, the EQ has a satisfyingly wide range of 50Hz to 20kHz.
Each Track also has a 'Punch' parameter, a preset compressor that's roughly equivalent to the global dynamics section. Simplicity is again the name of the game: Power, Snap, Hard and Soft are the basic, informatively named presets, you choose the 'Drive' value with the continuously variable knob, and a neat meter that encircles the Drive control keeps you informed of the gain reduction in operation. Obviously, this effect suits percussive material especially well, allowing you to sculpt a sound's volume envelope as well as giving it some 'oomph'.
Level, Pan, Ambience send and Rear balance controls are also located here (the last of which is operative in surround mode only), plus an individual output routing control. Reflecting the maximum number of Patterns in a Style, the applications can each have up to 14 mono outs, in addition to the main stereo out. How well these can be accessed depends on the host application. All 14 were easily available from within Cakewalk's Sonar.
Note that the data folders which contain all the looped performances have to be dragged manually to a Mac's hard drive, whereas they're installed automatically as part of the process on a PC. Also, be aware that an update is available on-line for Mac users who plan to access the Audio Units versions via Apple's Logic v6.x and higher. Sadly, this had no effect on a strange anomaly involving the RTAS version: the plug-in seems to load into Pro Tools LE, but doesn't do so fully. There is no way to access the main window, as a result of which no patterns can be loaded. This issue was still unresolved as I finished my review.
b1e95dc632