Cultural Diversity

Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

Wizoo Latigo

Latigo ($299) is Darbuka's Latin American cousin. Its GUI is identical except for its coloration, and its operation is exactly the same (see Fig. 8). That's because Latigo is also built on Wizoo's FlexGroove engine. Latigo specializes in Caribbean, Central American, and South American percussion grooves. It supplies 839 MB of content comprising multitrack patterns played by two very busy session percussionists, Edwin Bonilla and Olbin Burgos.

The primary differences between Latigo and Darbuka are the instruments and the musical genres. Instruments include bongos, congas, timbales, maracas, and a complete drum kit. Latigo's 23 Styles (which include 2 user Styles) run the gamut from Bolero, Bossa Nova, and Calypso to Merengue, Samba, and Songo (see Web Clip 8).

One other difference is that you can display Styles only by name, tempo, or type; the latter is a list of seven geographic origins such as Afro-Cuban and Venezuelan. In addition, all of Latigo's grooves are in 4/4 time. And whereas Darbuka has buttons to mute the high, mid, and bass tracks, Latigo has buttons labeled Drum, Skin, Metal, High, and Misc. They mute, respectively, the drum kit, hand drums such as congas and bongos, metal instruments such as timbales and agogo, high-pitched sounds such as cymbals and shakers, and miscellaneous percussion instruments such as whistles.

Latigo's PDF manual is virtually identical to Darbuka's, too. Other than the sections specifically regarding Latin instruments and styles, it contains the same wording and diagrams.

Yellow Tools Culture

As the first Modular Virtual Instrument from Yellow Tools, Culture ($339) has been around longer than any other product surveyed here. It combines a sophisticated and highly customizable sample player with 8.79 GB of content. Each instrument can comprise hundreds of samples and up to 16 Velocity layers per note. Culture offers detailed sounds that allow realistic performances using a variety of playing techniques.

Although Culture's focus is on world drums and ethnic percussion, it also features a number of industrial sounds, such as barrels and trash cans, and orchestral sounds, such as timpani and snares. The majority of sounds are Latin instruments such as bongos, cajons, congas, and timbales. You'll also find a nice selection of Middle Eastern instruments such as dumbek, darbuka, and tablas, and African instruments such as udu, djembe, and dunun. Far Eastern instruments include taiko drums, gamelan chimes, and kokiriko.

An individual instrument in Culture is called a Layer, and you can combine as many as eight Layers in a Multi. Culture ships with an assortment of ready-made Multis, including an African Multi, a flamenco Multi, 17 Brazilian Multis, and over two dozen more for Latin musical styles.

Culture gives you lots of controls for creating and customizing Layers and Multis (see Fig. 9). Its front panel is divided into the Basic section in the upper half and the Pro Editor in the lower half. In the Basic section, you can specify or change any part's volume and panning, MIDI channel, key range and Velocity range, polyphony, and other parameters. Clicking on the Alternate button ensures that you'll never play the same sample twice in succession, contributing to a response that sounds natural. For each Layer, you can set up dynamic mapping, Velocity curves, and even the response of the mod wheel for real-time volume control.

The Pro Editor affects key groups and provides access to envelope parameters, tuning, playback modes, and audio functions such as enabling reverse play and specifying sample start point. Fixed MIDI CC mapping lets you control all parameters with external controllers or sequencer automation. An onscreen keyboard displays note mapping for the selected Layer. Buttons allow you to perform functions such as editing and copying parameters from one key group to another. All of the controls are explained in Culture's 41-page manual.

After you've registered with Yellow Tools as a Culture user, you can download Culture Groove Pack, an excellent 5.3 MB collection of more than 1,100 MIDI files. They supply grooves programmed especially for Culture in assorted musical styles (see Web Clip 9). Grooves are sorted into folders by region and by instrument. In addition to basic grooves as long as two minutes, Groove Pack gives you fills, breaks, and other variations.

Zero-G Afrolatin Slam

Afro-Latinos are people from Latin America of African descent. Like almost any ethnic group, they have a distinct musical heritage. Afro-Latin music is a cultural fusion that embraces the music of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. Afrolatin Slam ($99.95), a Virtual Sound Module in Zero-G's ProSample Platinum (PSP) series, captures its flavor by pairing 465 MB of time-sliced loops with Intakt Instrument (see Fig. 10). Production credits go to Francis Fuster, a percussionist from Sierra Leone who has worked extensively with Hugh Masekela as well as Paul Simon and Joan Baez, and Kenyan producer and multi-instrumentalist Sultan Makendé, better known as Dave Yowell.

Afrolatin Slam's rhythmic and melodic content embraces all of its musical influences. Besides places like Cuba, Jamaica, Venezuela, and Brazil, its timbral palette comes from the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Ghana. Loops are divided into six main categories: African, Afrolatin Fusion, Caribbean, Latin American, Instruments & Hits, and Miscellaneous Loops. Miscellaneous Loops contains a mishmash of recordings that defy categorization, such as 082 Scratchy, 095 Funky Dread Drums, and 134 Dark Drum'n Bass.

Regional subcategories break loops down into musical instruments or styles, with their names preceded by tempos. Afrolatin Fusion's subcategories, for example, are 074 Slow Clave, 108 Congas, 112 Congas, 120 Afrosamba, 130 Afrosamba, 153 Speedbash, and 170 Afrobossa. Although Latin American subcategories include 072 Candomblé, 103 Maracatu, 128 Samba, 152 Pandeiro, and 24 others, the Caribbean subcategory includes only 140 Soca. Subcategories may have as few as 1 preset or as many as 15; 130 High Life, for instance, has Bell Shakers, Lead Conga, Mix, Mix No Conga, and Rhythm Conga. I found loops as short as 2 measures and as long as 40.

Most of Afrolatin Slam's presets map a complete loop to the lowest note on a 5-octave keyboard and individual slices to the remaining notes. You can trigger a complete conga loop, for instance, or manually play the congas one hit at a time.

Some presets, including everything in the Instruments & Hits category, furnish multisamples mapped across the keyboard. As with Orient World, though, the release portion of the envelopes is too short for most percussion sounds to fade naturally. Unless you want to create the illusion of muting hits, then, you'll want to extend the release times for every sound if you intend to play from the keyboard or use drum pads.

The loops in Afrolatin Slam definitely have a live feel and will impart your music with rhythms you're unlikely to find anywhere else (see Web Clip 10). Documentation consists of an Intakt Instrument manual, a few HTML files, and a PDF listing of categories, subcategories, and presets.