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KeyboardMag.com >> This Month >> Digital Sound Works Dramatic Percussion
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Virtual Percussion Instrument (PC)
Digital Sound Works Dramatic PercussionIf you’re scoring films or TV, Dramatic Percussion could be exactly what you’re looking for. This library is packed with production-quality sounds that can add depth and atmosphere to almost any soundtrack. The sampling is impeccable, the ambiences are rich, and there’s no filler — it’s all good stuff. Dramatic Percussion is packaged in the TASCAM Giga Virtual Instrument (GVI) sample playback instrument. I installed it on my aging but still capable 3GHz Pentium 4 PC and used it both in standalone mode and in Steinberg Cubase 4.1. A Syncrosoft USB dongle is included, but the manual doesn’t say how to use it; nor is the Syncrosoft License Control Center software installed with the library. For experienced users, this will be a non-issue. The list of sound categories (see “Vital Stats” at left) isn’t long, but each category includes from four to as many as 40 presets with different samples, different performance handling, or different effects processing. Useful performance control is included for many of the sounds. For instance, in one of the Concert Toms presets, the mod wheel crossfades from a stereo room sound to an under-the-drum mic. In one of the Anklung presets, the mod wheel introduces and then speeds up a repetition of the sound — just the thing for a suspenseful moment. The preset names generally give you a good idea of what to expect. The cassa (concert bass drum), gong, and bowed cymbal sounds are also ideal for suspense, and the bowed waterphones are absolutely hair-raising. Some of the cassa presets sound bowed rather than struck; apparently the sound was produced by rolling or dragging a rubber ball across the drumhead. Percussive sounds like the puili (Hawaiian bamboo sticks) and boo bams would be equally useful in suspense or in ethnic percussion grooves. Each of the seven octobans uses two separate key zones, which are mapped to two adjacent white keys. Because the samples are different, playing a trill gives a realistic effect of a drummer doing a roll with two sticks. The Taos drum preset includes both conventional struck drum samples and some that sound like a bass flute. The GVI instrument includes a terrific-sounding convolution reverb called GigaPulse, but running several instances of it will quickly tax your CPU. If your machine is not ultra-new and ultra-fast, you may prefer to load the instrument sounds without the GigaPulse processing. This is easy to do, but GigaPulse adds to the depth of many of the sounds, so shutting it off will be a compromise. You can’t extend the key range of samples using the GVI interface. I realize the value of playing samples of exotic instruments like these in their real-world ranges, but it’d also be nice to be able to get creative and break the rules. There is something of a workaround: You can retune a patch to match the range of your piece by reassigning one of the MIDI mixer sliders to either coarse tuning (an octave in either direction) or fine tuning (a half-step in either direction). You can then save these settings as a Dramatic Percusssion Preset for recall later. Using Dramatic Percussion in Steinberg Cubase as a VST plug-in, I ran into two problems, one minor and one more significant. First, freezing a GVI instrument track crashed Cubase more than once, although not every time. Fortunately, Cubase’s “Export Audio Mixdown” command worked reliably, and produced much the same result — I could bounce an audio file, then turn off GVI, thereby reducing CPU usage. Second, when I created a rhythm groove using four tracks, the occasional note would fail to sound, seemingly at random. Needless to say, when the surdo (i.e., the bass drum) fails to play on a downbeat, it’s noticeable. As I only heard skipped notes in presets that used round-robin, alternating, or random sample selection to add realism, my best guess is that a bug in behind-the-scenes MIDI processing sometimes causes an incoming note message to get sent off to an inactive key. Presets with straightforward sample playback were totally reliable. TASCAM, Digital Sound Works, and Keyboard editors Stephen Fortner and Craig Anderton [Craig reviewed Dramatic Percussion for the April ’08 issue of our sister mag, EQ. —Ed.], all tried to duplicate my experience, but had no problems at all, so the issue may have surfaced due to some peculiarity of my system, and the likelihood that you’ll experience this problem seems slim. The sounds of Dramatic Percussion are simply too good to miss. As we went to press, TASCAM informed us that they were beta-testing the Mac version of GVI, and that there’s a good chance Mac users will be able to enjoy Dramatic Percussion and other GVI-based soft instruments by the time you read this. Sample-based library of exotic cinematic percussion, with embedded TASCAM virtual instrument engine. Pros Cons $199 VITAL STATSSYSTEM REQUIREMENTS PLUG-IN FORMATS SOUND CATEGORIES COPY PROTECTION |
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