NUSofting DK+ User's manual 1.5 copyright (c) 2006 NUSofting All Rights Reserved

 

Thank you for using NUSofting DK+ version 1.5.

NUSofting DK+ is a powerful drum machine for VST.


DK+ offers 24 fully programmable drum pads, 6 output busses (3 stereo + 3 mono),
an audio compressor/limiter for each stereo bus, a powerful step sequencer and many more features.

It ships with a library of 32 drum kits with the sound of the most widely used vintage drum machines,
studio-quality acoustic kits and much more. It also offers a wide library of drum styles
ranging from Latin rhythms to classic rock and modern styles.

We hope you will enjoy this instrument!

 

Read the License and the "known issues" here

Basic operations

The top bar shows three buttons: MENU, DRUMS and STEPS.

The bottom bar shows two displays. The one on the left allows selecting a drum kit in the library,
the right one lets you select the pattern (style).

Note that not every drum style is available for every drum kit, because some drum styles are simply impossible to play with some limited drum kits, especially those sampled from older and cheap drum machines.

NOTE An asterisk (*) after the name of the style means that the style is not available for the current drum kit selected.
Likewise an asterisk after the name of the drum kit means that the style selected is not available for the drum bank.


MENU button, the main menu

Use the MENU button to open the main menu.

Styles:

By selecting Styles In the main menu you can browse the large sound and style library available.

Choosing ”by rhythm” you can select the rhythm you wish to play and then select the drum kit.

Browsing the library “by sound” you can select the drum kit first and the style then.

Using this command the drum machine will start to play the rhythm as soon as you start the playback
or the recording in your sequencer.

Banks:

Using the banks menu you can load and save the drum machine settings
(the drum kit and the sequencer patterns, all in one file).

Reset:

Using this submenu you can reset the entire drum machine or reset the midi controllers.

Preferences:

Use the Preferences command to set-up some options of the drum machine.

1.5: Added a global preference to use the FX Send control as a send gain on the Aux 3 output as an alternative to the Reverb send per pad.

 

 

DRUMS button, the drums editor

By clicking the DRUMS button you can access the drum page. The drum page is shown by default when DK+ is started.

Velocity control

The velocity control adjusts the dynamic response of the drum machine. It can compress or expand MIDI velocities. Because every MIDI keyboard or trigger can have a different dynamic response, you can use this control to match the midi velocity response of your midi keyboard.


P.B. Range

Use this control to set-up the pitch bend range of the drum machine. Some drum sounds can optionally respond to the pitch bend messages (see the Pad Editor).


Output levels

Each oputput control can adjust (+/-24dB) the output level of the 3 stereo busses of DK+.


Compressor switches and editors

Near the output controls of the stereo busses are located two buttons.

The one with a small “E” opens the compressor editor in a popup window, the other turns on or off the compressor..

NOTE When a compressor is active, the LEVEL control is applied before sending the audio signal to the compressor, so the control cannot be used to adjust the output level, but it can be used to introduce the well-known “pumping” effects in the drums sound.


Peak meters

The six peak meter bars allow you to monitor the peak level of the stereo busses.
To enable or disable the monitors use the MONITORS button, placed below the monitor bars.

HINT Turn off the monitors if you do not need them, because monitoring the audio signal requires some additional CPU power.


The pad area

The bottom pane of "DRUMS" page shows the 24 pads of the DK+ arranged in 24 boxes, each box has three buttons:


  • The main button has several functions:

    • Drag and drop support the main button can be a target of a drag and drop operation. You can drop a wave file (.WAV) on it and the pad will play the sound of the wave file. You can also drop multiple files and each one will be added to each consecutive pad.

    • Activity monitoring: the button will light up monitoring when that pad is playing, either by MIDI or by the internal DK+ sequencer.

    • Composing in step mode Clicking on a pad generates a MIDI note corresponding to the selected pad.

    • Hearing the sound: You can hear the sound assigned to a pad by clicking on it. If clicking on a pad does not generate any sound, you can activate the option “Play directly the sound when clicking on a pad” using the Preferences menu. However, this will disable the MIDI note generation, but this function is very useful to preview or edit drum kits.

  • The blue button [E] brings up the voice editor pop up window.

  • The red button [M] is a selector for the mute group, options are: M (off), 1, 2, 3, 4. You may change the mute group clicking over this button.


NOTE A mute group is simply a mechanism that allows the sound of one pad to interrupt the sound of another pad belonging to the same group. For example, if you have an open hi-hat sample and a closed hi-hat sample, you may want to force the sound of the open hi-hat to interrupt when the closed hi-hat sound begins to play, just like happens with the real instrument.

Below each pad button, a small display shows the name of the pad. To rename a pad, just click on the display and type in the new name, then press enter. To leave the name as-is, press the ESCape key or click elsewhere with the mouse.

HINT Always rename the drum pad including a brief description of the sound.


Compressor editor

If you are familiar with compressors, you can skip this explanation and use the built-in compressors directly.


A compressor is a tool that reduces the volume of the signal when its loudness gets above a certain threshold.
Using the THRESHOLD control, you can set this threshold; using the RATIO control you can adjust the volume reduction caused by the compressor.

Generally speaking, typical settings for a compressor are 1:2 for lower threshold (-24dB) or greater than 1:10 for higher threshold (limiters).
The ATTACK and RELEASE knobs control the time that the compressor will take to “lower” the volume of the signal to the specified attenuation value (threshold and ratio) and the time that the compressor will take to restore the volume to the maximum level.

Reducing the louder parts of the signal will allow raising the output volume, increasing the overall perceived “loudness” of the signal.
Each of the three stereo compressor/limiters can be edited separately.

Pad Editor

As mentioned earlier, the pad editor can be opened by clicking on the [E] button near each drum pad.

It can also be opened in the sequencer window by clicking the button with the track number.

In this window you can assign sample sounds to the drum pad and set up various parameters, such as the sound level, pan and more…

The control Pad Name has the same functionof the display placed under the pad you are editing, that is, it allows giving a name to the drum pad.


Assigning a MIDI key and a keyboard range to a drum pad.

The KEY controls, on the top-left corner of the editor window, allows setting the MIDI keys, which the pad will respond to.


There are three different key controls (Low, Center and High).

Holding down the SHIFT key on your PC keyboard and clicking on any of the “LEARN” buttons, DK+ will wait until you press a key on your MIDI master keyboard and will associate that key with the pad being edited. You may now press the MIDI key to trigger the drum pad.


A pad can also respond to multiple MIDI notes, in a given MIDI range. To set the low and the high ranges of the pad, just change the LOW and the HIGH values, by either clicking on the display and entering a MIDI note (0 to 127) or using the LEARN button below each display.


You can also transpose the drum samples assigned to a drum pad by changing the “Center” midi note.

The logic behind these controls is the one used in a normal PCM sampler.



Assigning samples to a drum pad.

The group of ten displays, under the SAMPLES section allows selecting one or more wave samples to associate with the drum pad. To load a sample click on the [+] button, to unload it click on the [-] button.


A drum pad can also have up to ten cross-velocity layers. The cross velocity is a feature that allows to play different samples at different MIDI velocity.

For example, say you have two snare drum samples, one taken playing gently on the snare and the other one playing normally. To use these two samples in DK+, load the first one in the first sample slot , then the second sample in the second slot.

Last, set the MIDI velocity “threshold” that will make the pad play the sample specified in the second slot instead of the first one, by clicking on the leftmost display (set to zero) and enter the desired cross velocity value.

Samples with the same MIDI velocity “threshold” will be played by the DK+ randomly. This feature allows you to mix velocity selection with random selection of layers for maximum flexibility.


Moreover, DK+ offers a weighted random choice of the samples. To activate this option switch on the Random button. With this feature turned on the numeric values at the right on the sample slots act as weight for the sample probability to be played, so each pad can store and play up to ten samples and you can choose which ones will be played more often and which ones less often, by setting the weight value for each sample. A few example patterns are provided to show this creative feature.


NOTES

  • The maximum MIDI velocity allowed is 127, the minimum is 0.

  • DK+ can import wave files with 8, 16, 20, 24 and 32 bit integer resolution, and 32 or 64 bit floating point resolution, mono or stereo.

  • DK+ will also resample automatically the sounds if they are stored at a higher or lower sample rate than the sample rate used in the host application. To improve the resampling quality you can activate the option “Use quality resampling” in the preferences dialog.

  • All the samples loaded are normalized automatically.


Voice controls.


The level control allows adjusting the volume of the drum pad.

The pan knob controls the stereo position of the sound

The tune knob can shift up or down the drum samples by +/-14 semitones. Greater pitch shifts can be achieved changing the center midi note.


Sometimes you may want to use the pitch bend over a few sounds in your drum kit.

The pitch bend switch, when turned on, will make the pad sensible to pitch bend message, that is, its intonation can be varied using the pitch bend control on your MIDI keyboard.

The note off switch should be used only when you want that a particular sample will turn off when you release the MIDI note on your keyboard.

The FX Send knob adjust the amount of reverb for this drum pad. The internal reverb of DK+ is not intended to be used in productions, but it can be useful to test the drum kits or create quickly a song using the internal styles. You can turn the reverb off using the appropriate option in the preferences dialog.

For each voice, DK+ offers a -12dB/octave low pass filter. The cutoff controls the cutoff frequency and the velo control allows adjusting the MIDI velocity influence over the cutoff frequency.

1.5: The velocity controlled filter of each pad can now be selected as LP or HP, greatly extending sonic possibilities


HINT This feature can make more expressive some percussion instrument, without having multiple samples available. You can also control the cutoff frequency via MIDI.


Using the bus buttons you can select to which bus the sound generated by the drum pad will be routed.

 

 

STEPS button, the sequencer editor


DK+ features a powerful 10 Tracks step sequencer always synchronized to the VST host.

In each pattern set you can have up to 24 drum patterns.

To select a pattern use the pattern selection buttons (ABCDEFGHI...).

The lenght of each pattern can vary from 1 to 128 steps. You can set the pattern length by clicking on the series of leds above the drum pads area.

The display next to "Lenght" will show you the number of steps of the current pattern.

The steps are visually arranged in pages of 16 steps each, so you have 8 pages of steps available. To select a page click on the page number.


Tracks

The first thing to do when working in the sequencer is to assign a drum pad to a track, by clicking on the slot placed on the left of the steps.

Choose a non empty pad and your track will be ready for sequencing.


The button with the track number (on the left of the pad assignment slot) will bring up the Pad editor, just like the [E] button in the drums page, making easy to adjust that pad parameters without switching to the drums page.

For each track you see two small buttons on the far left, these allow you to mute
or soloing a track for editing or musical purpose.

On the far right the small knob is a mirror of the Level control of the Pad editor
of the selected Pad in the relative track.


Step editing

On/Off, Velocity, Flam and Double stroke.

Clicking on a step button you can turn it on or off (sound or no sound).

When a step is on, click and drag (up or down) on it to adjust the level (MIDI velocity from 1 to 127).

You can also right click on an active steps several time,
in this way you can select one of the three play modes of the step:

  1. red level : single trigger

  2. yellow level : flam trigger*

  3. blue level: double trigger**


*a flam is a double stroke where the first hit happens a little earlier than the second one which is on tempo.

**a double trigger is a double stroke where the legth of the step is evenly divided in two equal duration, so for example a 1/16 step will trigger two notes of 1/32 each. The two triggers have the same sound level (velocity). This it useful to create rolls quickly.


Sequencer On/Off

This switch in the bottom left corner allows to switch the sequencer on or off.


Step length

This is the duration of one step relative to the VST host tempo.
Step resolution: 32, 32T, 8T or 16 are possible. E.G. setting 32 means
that one pattern needs to be 32 steps long to fit a 4/4 bar as mesured in the VST host.


Swing control

The Swing knob in the bottom right corner provides the typical swing/shuffle groove control.

It shifts the time of every second octave when the step length is set to 16, or it shifts every second sixteenth of note when the step length is set to 32.

The swing control is disabled for 16T and 8T times division.


Advanced editing functions

Many handy functions for Tracks, Pages and Patterns are available in locals menus.
To bring up these menu you must "right click" in one of the hot areas:

  • Right clicking on a page button opens a menu that allows to copy the content of one page to another.

  • Right clicking on a pattern button opens a menu with the following functions:

    • "Load" load a single pattern file

    • "Save" save a single pattern file

    • "Copy to" copy the single pattern to one of the other 23 memories

    • "Load All Patterns" load a 24 patterns memory file

    • "Save All Patterns" save a 24 patterns memory file

    • "Export SMF" export the single pattern as standard MIDI file. 1.5: Drag&Drop export is available by the note icon on panel.

    • "Set Color" choose one of the 6 avaiable color for the selected button

    • "Clear" delete the settings of the selected pattern

  • Right clicking on the pad selection slots opens a menu with the following functions:

    • "Shift Right" shift steps setting one step to the right

    • "Shift Left" shift steps setting one step to the left

    • "Rotate Right" shift steps setting one step to the right, the steps going over pattern length appears at the beginning of the track

    • "Rotate Left" shift steps setting one step to the left, the steps going below position 1 appears at the end of the track

    • "Erase" clear all track steps setting

    • "Random Type1" automatically create a one track pattern suited for kick drum

    • "Random Type2" automatically create a one track pattern suited for snare drum

    • "Variate by +/- 5" variates the MIDI velocities by +/- 5

    • "Variate by +/- 10" variates the MIDI velocities by +/- 10

    • "Fill" fill all steps in the track with one of the 9 rythmical figures available in the sub menu, suited for Hi Hats or similar percusssion parts: ride cymbal, tambourine, maracas, shaker.

    • "Human Fill" same as above but with small random variation for the velocity values

    • "Copy to n" copy the settings of the steps of the selected track to any of the others

 

 

Loading and saving drum kits

To load a drum kit which is not part of the Library, click on the "MENU" button and select “Load Bank”.
A familiar file selection window will appear. Now you are able select and open the drum kit you wish to load.


If DK+ will not find a file contained in the same folder of the bank file, it will search for the file using the original path.
In case you moved the original samples, put them in the same folder as the bank file.


If you created a new kit or modified an existing one, you probably will want to save it.
To save a drum kit the drum banks, you can click on “Save Bank” from the same menu.
Then type in the bank name you wish to save.

DK+ can also import drum banks created for the popular Steinberg LM-4 drum machine.

To import these banks, click on the "MENU" button, select Load Bank and in the file type selection choose "LM-4".

However, because DK+ is very different from LM-4, some settings of the original sound bank cannot be imported (pan, levels).

It is not always necessary to save the drum kit when you close a song, because the host should save the settings of DK+ with the song, and reload the drum kit automatically when you re-open the same song.

 

1.5: Kit and Style names are now saved with the host song or project. Also, they will be marked with a "*" if edited before saving.

MIDI integration


Advantages of MIDI message over VST automation

  • Almost every sequencer features a powerful MIDI editor, so you can easily automate several parameters without additional efforts.

  • Once you modified the settings with the VST automation, the program of a VST plug-in is altered (running the risk of ruining it, if you not saved earlier). With MIDI messages, you can send a “Reset all controllers” message to the instrument, and the instrument will restore its internal state as it was originally.

  • MIDI events have a superior “timing” precision than VST automation.

  • VST events often require a user interface repainting, to keep up-to-date the controls displayed in the editors, requiring some additional CPU power.

Advantages of VST automation over MIDI messages

  • More intuitive

  • Has finer resolution (32 bit floating point) than MIDI messages (7 bit data)


Understanding the DK+ MIDI support

NUSofting DK+ features 24 drum pads, but only the first 15 can be controlled via MIDI messages.

You can adjust the properties of a single drum pad by sending regular control changes to the channel corresponding to the number of the pad you want to edit.

See the “MIDI control messages supported” section for more information.


The channel 16 is reserved for sequencer control. The midi notes ranging from C1 (#36) to B2 select one of the 24 patterns of the DK+ internal sequencer.

If you are using DK+ in a live performance and would like to trigger the patterns via a MIDI keyboard, you may want that the pattern switch will only occur at the end the pattern. You can enable/disable the “Sequencer Live mode” in the Preferences dialog.


MIDI control messages supported


CC #71 Cutoff frequency

CC #9 NA Volume (64 = 0dB)

CC#12 NA Pan (64 = Center)

CC#16 Generic 1 Velocity (applies to all the pads)

CC#17 Generic 2 Low-pass Filter velocity (0 = off)

CC#18 Generic 3 Pitch bend range (applies to all the pads)

CC#19 Generic 4 Tune (64 = normal)

 

If you have difficulties using DK+ or experience technical problems, or just want to tell us your opinion about this product, do not hesitate to contact us at nusofting@liqihsynth.com


You may also check the support page of nusofting.com.

Have fun!


Your NUSofting Team

"known issues" and License.

DK+ is compatible with most VST Hosts, it has been succesfully tested in Cubase, Orion, FL Studio, EnergyXT,
Chainer and others. A few problems where reported with Tracktion and those will be fixed in the next update.

An issue you may experience in any host with sequencer, like Cubase, is missing the first note of the DK+ step sequencer

on playback, this problem is part of the realtime beaviour of VST host, anyway it should not affect the rendered mixdown

but only the realtime playback. Please report to us any other problems you may experience with DK+, thanks.

 

DK+ version 1.5, copyright NUSofting 2006

 

LICENSE TERMS FOR Nusofting.com SOFTWARE

The software is provided to the user "as is". Nusofting.com makes no warranties, either express or implied, with respect to the software and associated materials provided to the user, including but not limited to any warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. Nusofting.com does not warrant that the functions contained in the software will meet your requirements, or that the operation of the software will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that defects in the software will be corrected.

Nusofting.com does not warrant or make any representations regarding the use or the results of the use of the software or any documentation provided therewith in terms of their correctness, accuracy, reliability, or otherwise. No information or advice given by Liqih shall create a warranty or in any way increase the scope of this warranty.

Nusofting.com is not liable for any claims or damages whatsoever, including property damage, personal injury, intellectual property infringement, loss of profits, or interruption of business, or for any special, consequential or incidental damages, however caused.

The user is not allowed to distribute the program. Further, the user may not modify, the user may not decompile and the user may not debug the software. The user may use the program on any computer he or she personally own.

VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies AG

By using this software, Peti VST plugin, you agree the above statements ------------------------------------------------------------

http://nusofting.liqihsynth.com - Liqih Synth