M-Audio Wizoo Darbuka [9/30] The play page

Darbuka • User Guide 4

English

The Play Page

The ﬁrst page you’ll see when you start Darbuka is the

Play Page. On this page you will ﬁnd most of the general

controls for the whole percussion instrument, the types of

controls that affect all or most Tracks being played in a

Style. Let’s take a deeper look at what’s possible and what

might be useful when making music with Darbuka .

Speed

The Speed control allows you to run Darbuka at normal,

half or double your song tempo. This can be very useful

in some situations:

Maybe you’re working on a slow groove masterpiece that’s 80 beats per minute but running your host

application at 160, you’ve been working for months and you realize that the last thing you need is some

Darbukas Congas in the middle eight, you load a Style in anticipation and your lovely delicate middle eight is

now full of drummers on Guarana, the cat gives birth, light bulbs explode..... Never fear, we at Wizoo value

our cats and our light bulbs, with a casual ﬂick of the Speed switch to Half the world will become normal again

and hey the Darbukas sound pretty good in there too.

Speed control can also be quite a useful creative tool, allowing you the ﬂexibility to play a nice syncopated 80

BPM groove over a 160 bpm Drum’n’Bass track or an interesting half time groove over a 110 bpm pop song. It’s

up to you, Darbuka has no tempo limits.

Variance

Variance is a sophisticated feature with a very simple control. What it does is replace percussion hits within

each Track with other percussion hits that sound similar from within the Style, in effect adding variation to each

Track. A setting of Max replaces a lot of hits with similar hits and the Off setting plays the groove exactly as the

original percussionists played it.

Timing

The Timing control might also be called humanize or even quantize. Setting Timing to the center value of ﬁfty

percent plays the percussion grooves with all the natural anticipations and feel of the real players, increasing

the value towards Tight quantizes the timing to strict machine like precision, and decreasing towards Loose

exaggerates the natural live timing.

Quantize

Quantize sets a maximum musical timing resolution. Any percussion hits that fall outside of this timing grid

are removed. For example you may like a particular Style but there are a lot of 32nd and 64th note rolls and

ﬁlls and what you’d really like is for the groove to be simpler. Try setting Quantize to a value of 1/16th, all of the

busy ﬁlls are removed and only the notes that fall close to a 16th note in the bar remain, in effect simplifying

the groove. Of course you can simplify Styles quite a lot, right down to a1/4 note value.

Experimenting with combinations of the Tempo and Quantize features can lead to interesting and useful

rhythmic variations.

Swing

Swing is a feature most are familiar with. This control pushes the timing of all Tracks in a Style from their original

position in a groove towards a triplet timing. In some cases a Style is already naturally playing a triplet feel in

which case the Swing control pushes the triplet beats to an even later position in the bar.