Getting Started:
Note: The Infinite Player and the Infinite Player Drum Masters sound library must be previously installed for the following instructions to be relevant.
This guide will take you through some of the features of both: Drum Masters Grooves and Kits, Multi-track and Stereo.
After opening Kontakt Player 2 Infinite Player you will see the Infinite Player Menu. After the Infinite Player sound library is installed, this is the starting point for loading your new drum sounds and grooves.
Drum Masters Drum Grooves:
Drum Masters Grooves come as Multi-track or Stereo. They have been mapped as “Menu Maps”. Once a specific artist’s Groove library has been installed you will see it is broken down into many different Instrument patches (nki’s). For Multi-track and Stereo it is important to remember that only ONE patch can be loaded at a time or loops will overlap.
All Drum Masters Grooves are Rex2. They automatically adjust to the tempo in Kontakt Player 2 or your DAW. If you wish to use these loops without Kontakt simply navigate to your “Samples” folder (within the Infinite Player Library folder structure) for that specific product and you will have access to all of the Rex2 files for that particular artist or style. Please see the manual for your specific DAW and refer to the section on using Rex files.
Stereo Drum Grooves
Drum Masters Stereo Drum Groove patches can be found under the Instruments tab on your Infinite Player under “Drum Masters Stereo/Stereo Drum Grooves”.
These Stereo Grooves are broken down by Artist, tempo, and description. To load a patch, simply navigate to it from the Instruments tab and select the desired patch.
Once open, you will have a those artist specific loops spread across your midi controller. This is called a Menu Map. Menu Maps are organized by tempo and style. Adjust your tempo in Kontakt Player 2 or in your Host DAW to speed up or slow down your selected menu map of grooves. These grooves are Stereo so only Kontakt Player audio outputs 1 and 2 are used.
Multitrack Drum Grooves
Before loading any of the Drum Masters Multitrack Drum Grooves patches an Output Multi must be loaded for correct Kontakt Multi-track output routing and mix control. To load the output multi simply click on “Multis/Drum Masters Multitrack/Multitrack Drum Grooves/MT Output Multi” (As seen below).
Once your Multi-track Output Multi has been loaded you can easily load any Multi-track drum groove patches since they all have been programmed with individual mic routing matching the MT Output Multi.
Drum Masters Groove Controls:
In addition to the controls that Kontakt Player 2 gives you, Sonic Reality has programmed some custom parameters for your Drum Masters Groove patches (Multi-track and Stereo). As seen above is the default panel any of our Drum Masters Groove controls per instrument. A description of each panel and its functions are given below:
The Control Panel
Volume
Here you have easy control over the volume of all the loops in that particular Menu Map or Nki
Panning
This is just simple Pan control for the user that wants to Pan their loops Left or Right.
Velocity
Velocity to amp amount allows you to make the grooves more or less dynamic. We set the default velocity to an overall setting that should work well with all keyboard controllers. You will not only find optimum settings for your controller, but adjust velocity for each individual instrument depending on the musical dynamics you are trying to achieve.
The Envelope Panel
Envelope
Envelope controls over grooves give you the ability to adjust the volume throughout the grooves.
The EQ Panel
There is a three band EQ for all the grooves in a menu map.
The Groove Panel
Here you have control over the Slice Attack and Slice Release control. This helps keep the groove sounding natural when speeding up or slowing down a groove from its natural tempo denoted by the patch name.
Drum Masters Drum Kits:
Drum Masters Stereo and Multi-track Drum Kits consist of Multis and Instruments. A Drum Masters “Multi” is a set of kit pieces making up the particular kit. To load a kit simply select one of the multi’s from the browser and drag it to the right into the Kontakt Player instrument window. You can also load individual instruments of a particular kit or replace a kit piece from an existing kit with one from another kit which we’ll discuss a little further in the manual. One important thing you will notice on each kit piece after loading a kit is the “IMAP” tab on each Drum Masters Drum kit instruments. (See Below)
This tab controls the type of Mapping (either IMAP or GM) your kit is laid out as. Simply, which keys on your controller trigger which hits. A description of the two styles of mapping are given below. The mapping can be changed globally over all your instruments via a key-switch which is located on B-1 of your midi controller.
IMAP and GM Formats
I-MAP
I-MAP is a proprietary MIDI note mapping/drum kit layout scheme developed by Sonic Reality that facilitates improved live performance of drum kits via MIDI keyboard input. I-MAP places drums in their most flexible and intuitive position, allowing each of the fingers on both hands independent and coordinated control over the loaded kit. With very little practice, it is possible to lay down complete drum grooves in a single take that have incredible feel and groove. Having Drum Masters mapped over the I-MAP gives the user an amazing amount of versatility and creativity having dedicated keys for rolls, ghost notes, cymbal swells and alt hits just to name a few.
GM
This is the classic mapping format standardized in 1991. Sonic Reality’s IMAP/GM remapping button works by taking selected IMAP notes and sending them to the GM notes instead. You can change each instrument to IMAP or GM individually as well as changing midi channels. This allows ultimate creativity and flexibility when using IMAP and/or GM midi loops.
NOTE: ALL Drum Master patches Load as IMAP by default. Therefore must be key-switched to GM whenever loading your session or previously loaded kit.
Stereo Drum Kits
The Drum Masters Stereo Drum Kits are located under the “Multis” tab of your Infinite Player browser. Individual drum kit pieces can be found under the Instruments tab.
Stereo Drum kits have some simple controls over the kit piece. On the main panel of all drum kit pieces you have control over that particular instruments Volume, Pan and Velocity to Amp. You also have control over the mapping of the drum kit. All kits default to IMAP drum mapping but can easily be switched to GM by simply clicking the IMAP tab. In addition you have envelope controls which can be seen under the Controls drop down menu.
The Controls Panel
Volume
Here you have easy control over the volume of that particular kit piece.
Panning
This is just simple pan control for the user that wants to Pan their kit piece Left or Right
Velocity
Velocity to amp amount allows you to make the kit piece more or less dynamic. We set the default velocity to an overall setting that should work well with all keyboard controllers. You will not only find optimum settings for your controller, but adjust velocity for each individual instrument depending on the musical dynamics you are trying to achieve.
The Envelope Panel
The primary practical application of envelope in Drum Masters is to shorten the duration (or release) of sound sources. Within each individual instrument, we provide the ability to control the release of the direct signal.
Multi-track Drum Kits
The multi-track Drum Masters kits can also be found under the Multis tab of your Infinite Player. Individual Instruments can be loaded from the Instruments tab. When you load Multi-track Drum Kit from under the Multis menu it loads all the instruments for that particular kit. It also loads a “Output Multi” which all your individual mic signals will be routed to. Like the stereo drum kits these multi-track kits have some useful controls to help manipulate the sound of the kit pieces.
The Direct Panel
Panning
This is just simple Pan control for the user that wants to Pan their kit piece Left or Right
Room Volume
This is control over the amount of “Room” you will hear for that particular instrument. Note: This control is for each instrument individually.. To adjust the amount of Room heard to the overall kit please adjust the level at the output faders.
Room Attack and Release
This is control over the attack and release of the “Room” signal for that particular instrument. Note: This control is also for each instrument individually.
The OH Panel
OH Volume
This is control over the amount of OH signal for the particular instrument. Adjusting this will only change the amount of OH signal for that instrument. For global control over the OH level of the entire kit please adjust at the output faders
The Velocity Panel
Velocity
Velocity to amp amount allows you to make the kit piece more or less dynamic. We set the default velocity to an overall setting that should work well with all keyboard controllers. You will not only find optimum settings for your controller, but adjust velocity for each individual instrument depending on the musical dynamics you are trying to achieve.
Output Multi
An Output Multi is the default outputs you must load before loading Multi-track Instruments. That means, Multi-track drum groove instruments and Multi-track drum kit instruments ONLY must have an Output multi opened BEFORE loading one of these patches. Multi-track drum kits on the other hand (Multis) already have the Output Multi built into the “multi” or .NKM. These Output multis are always found under the Multis tab in their product specific folders labeled “Output Multi”. Note: The Stereo Drum Masters Products never use an Output Multi.
The way Studio ProFiles are meant to be used.
The focus is on the main authentic signature grooves because the additional playable drum kit samples can be used to add an infinite amount of customization of lead ins, fills and breaks. This way the collections could offer more variety of grooves as opposed to only predetermined song part grooves where everyone could risk sounding the same. With this you are still very much a part of the creative process. It’s almost like having a drummer in the studio who starts off playing a groove and then you as the producer say to him “I like that beat but if you’d play a tom fill here and then the crash there that would be great”. You can just add in those specific parts you want yourself and without any argument from the drummer!
Mark Hornsby on Studio ProFiles Tempo Choices: “Sometimes the grooves were recorded at different tempos but generally they were recorded just in the main comfortable tempo that the drummer was playing. This way, the ideal feel of the groove is captured and since Sonic Reality developed a proprietary technique for creating the first ever time-aligned multi-track Rex 2 files, the grooves can later be played in different tempos by the end user of the product.”
The “Infinite Player” can read Sonic Reality’s proprietary multi-track Rex 2 files and has them conveniently mapped across the keyboard and layered with the same individual output assignments as the associated drum kit from that session so you can bounce them both to audio tracks in your song. In the end it can look like you were doing a multi-track drum session in the first place but without the need of a studio, the gear, the musicians, the engineer or the lengthy time and high cost to record a great sounding drum track. What a wonderful virtual world! You can make seamless transitions between the kit and grooves customizing your drum parts to suit your song in every way you’d want.
The Vertical Velocity vs. Horizontal Positional Method
As opposed to taking up space doing hundreds of velocities of one position of the drum where the sound’s only changes are from vertical velocities, Sonic Reality thought it was more important to cover different areas of each drum spread out horizontally across the keyboard such as a center hit, off center second stick hit, edge hit in two spots and various rim with a reasonable amount of velocity layers to achieve the same timbral variation of the original drum while the velocity to amp takes care of the dynamic changes in volume. With different positions of the kit spread across the keyboard it is more of the range of tones a drummer would have available when playing a real set.
The Secrets Behind Sonic Reality’s Multi-Track Rex Grooves
The task of editing the Studio ProFiles collections was even more daunting than the sample sessions. To do the editing and programming it can take many months or even years as it has with the Studio ProFiles series. This is because not only does each individual hit have to be marked, trimmed, separated, named and organized out of thousands but also each transient of every groove has to be meticulously "sliced" using three different programs, one of which is an application Sonic Reality had created specifically to be able to author time-aligned multi-track Rex files which was previously not possible. "Time-aligned" means that the time relationship between the direct mic sound and the ambient mics are kept intact even if the tempo is changed. There s actually a natural delay between the sound coming from each of the mics depending on how far away it is from the drum. Typically, for every foot away the mic is from the drum there is 1ms of latency. So, a room mic that is 10 feet away from the snare would potentially have a 10ms delay compared to the sound of the snare direct mic that is only a few inches from the snare head. When you record a live drummer these mics all work together to give you the depth perception of a drum kit played in a nice sounding room. It is crucial that when you make a Rex file, Apple Loop or Acidized Wave file that has slice points on the transients that compress or expand in time to sync to your host tempo that the time between the directs, your overheads and room does not change! They have to move together in sync. If they didn’t the depth perception could be all out of wack among other issues.
The way Sonic Reality solves this is by always having the transient slice point on the closest mic to the drum which is usually the directs, although for cymbals it would be the overheads. Even on the loop for the room mic the slice point is on the same place in time as the separate loop for the direct mic. In fact, like a grid, the slice points for a groove all MATCH between every discrete mic s loop so that when it is layered in your DAW on multiple tracks or inside the included Infinite Kontakt Player plug-in it doesn t matter if you speed it up or slow it down, the time relationship between the direct mics, the overheads and the room will always remain the same. This offers the elastic tempo capability of Rex format but with discrete mic channels to process through compressors, eqs, gates, reverbs and everything else you d use if you were recording/mixing a live multi-track drum session. That’s something new in this series that we’ve not seen before.
The Playable Kit vs. the Audio Grooves
So, one may ask if you have expressive playable kits then why do you even need the audio grooves? While you can do amazing things with a more expressive mapped kit like the I-Map there is still and always will be something about a great drummer’s playing that can only be heard from a recording of them actually playing it. There are so many places the drummer can hit on every kit piece with any part of the stick, with their own particular timing and feel not to mention each time they hit something a different part of the kit resonates and the room responds differently.
The goal of the Studio ProFiles series is to offer the authentic sound and feel of a real drummer playing but the flexibility to be able to play the parts that suit your song as opposed to having to be a slave to whatever the loop material offers. By using both the loops AND the drum kit both with the same discrete mic mixing you can finally be able to make a drum track that fools the ear into thinking you had a real live drummer playing on your songs… and not just any drummer but a world famous musician Jerry Marotta, Danny Gottlieb or Steve Gadd.
How the Infinite Player and Studio ProFiles differ from other plug-ins.
The Studio ProFiles “Infinite Player” plug-in differs in its approach to creating a drum track different than every other popular drum plug-in currently on the market. Most other drum plug-ins are either just playable drum kits accompanied by midi files such as BFD and EZ Drummer which have dedicated interfaces for discrete mic mixing but do not deal with audio loops at all. Then you have popular products like Stylus RMX which use Rex-style audio grooves but it offers no way to play the full velocity mapped drum kit used in the groove. The closest drum software that incorporates the concept of offering both the playable kits, midi grooves and the original audio grooves is Submersible’s DrumCore software but it is stereo only and does not offer the discrete multi-mic mixing capability. While Sonic Reality as a sound company supports BFD2, Stylus RMX and DrumCore with sound packs that will be sold on the new download site http://www.downloadablesoundz.com to get the only flexible tempo multi-track audio loops combined with playable multi-track drum kits and midi grooves, the Studio ProFiles series and Infinite Player is currently the only way to get those features in a plug-in.
