Wizoo Darbuka

Loop libraries have evolved through the years to the point where you can find some pretty convincing samples of instruments these days. Sampled loops from around the world have been available for sometime, but before the advent of programs such as Ableton Live or Acid, changing the tempo of the loop was never a walk in the park. Tempo aside, changing the panning of the drums, applying EQ and Effects to the individual instruments in the loop was simply not possible. Enter Wizoo's virtual musician concept that first gained popularity in their Virtual Guitarist application and apply it to loops. In this case, loops from Northern Africa, the Arabian Gulf and the Middle East, that's Darbuka.

Using Wizoo's proprietary FlexGroove Engine, Darbuka plays back performances from two great percussionists, Suat Borazan and Mohamed Zaki. It sounds convincing because the performances are played by real musicians with real instruments— it's that simple.

The installation process for Darbuka is pretty straightforward. I performed the installation on my PC, it consisted of putting the DVD into my computer's drive and clicking on the Setup.exe file. Once the installation is complete you have 30 days to try out the program, after that you'll have to register the product. Wizoo refers to this as Product Certification and it's done over the internet. It's a pretty painless affair, you submit your information on-line and they send you an email with a small file attached to it. Double click the file and your ready to go. There is a work around in case the computer you use for music is not connected to the internet, but you still need another computer that has internet access. I tested Darbuka on a PIII/500 Mhz. with 384 mg. ram, not the fastest computer in the world. Incidentally, this is pretty close to the minimum requirements set forth by Wizoo to use Darbuka.

On Your Marks...Get Set...Go!

Once I got Darbuka installed and certified, getting started was pretty standard fair, just call up the virtual instrument in the host application and you're ready to go. A window appeared that made me feel as though my PC just returned from a trip from Morocco. Darbuka's user interface is intuitively laid out and I sorta figured I need to load a Style from the left side of the screen and can edit it on the right. While the keyboard looking thing along the bottom could probably be used to trigger the performances.

Although I didn't need to refer to the manual to get some beats rolling, I did later sit down with the manual and read through it. It's worth the time as Wizoo has taken the effort to explain each function as well as include a section that introduces you to the different instruments within Darbuka. It's a good educational read and will ultimately help you use the virtual instrument more effectively.

Style Is Everything

In Darbuka, Styles are collections of individual tracks of instrument performances. You can load them up and play the performances back using your MIDI keyboard or the on screen keyboard. The loops automatically sync to your host tempo setting. This is very much an instant gratification experience. I spent a fair amount of time loading up different styles and thumping away on my keyboard. But this is just scratching the surface of Darbuka—there's much more to explore yet, on we go.

Styles are comprised of different tracks of instruments. When you load a specific Style, the associated tracks load up and are available for individual editing on the left side of the screen. It is easy to preview styles by simply clicking on the Listen Button in the lower left screen area. Click the Auto button and the Styles automatically play a short preview selection.

Here's where your MIDI keyboard or the on-screen keyboard comes into use. Each key triggers a unique pattern within the style. With Latch mode engaged, you only need to push the MIDI key and let go, Darbuka will continue the pattern until another one is triggered or the Stop key is hit.

The on-screen keyboard is unique in the sense that it is color coded. This makes triggering loops a bit more intuitive than from your MIDI controller. For exp ample, the blue keys represent normal rhythm grooves, dark blue keys the more heavier and busier ones while light blue keys trigger lighter or less busier grooves, a red key Stops playback.

Tracks are the different elements that make up a Style. There's a little 'plus' sign next to each Style listed in the browser, clicking on it reveals a list of tracks. This is significant because you can mix and match tracks with different styles, Darbuka allows you to add a track from one Style into the Play page of another—this is pretty powerful and in my opinion is one of the key things that sets Darbuka apart from being a mere collection of loops.

When you load a Style, the tracks appear as tabs on the Play page, along with a graphic of the instrument under the track name. By selecting a Track tab, you have access to variety of editing options as Darbuka automatically switches to the Mix tab.

Keeping Tabs On Things

The right side of Darbuka has three tabs, each with it's own array of functions and tools, they are the Play, Mix and Edit tabs. Controls on the Play tab are global, they affect all the tracks that are in a Style. By contrast, controls on the Mix tab affect individual tracks in the currently loaded Style.

Going from left to right, top to bottom on the Play tab, the first control you'll encounter is the Speed control. This control allows you to set the overall playback speed of the loops in relation to your host tempo setting. It can playback the loop half-time, normal, or double-time depending on it's current setting. One thing to note here is that you must stop and restart the Pattern for the Speed setting to take effect. The Variance control introduces a slight variation to the Style that's playing back using a slider control with a range of Off to Max. As expected the effect becomes more prominent as the slider is moved closer to the Max position. It replaces certain hits in a given track with other hits from tracks within the same Style.

The Timing control uses a slider to vary the timing accuracy of the Style with the range being from Loose to Tight. It's a variable control so you can set this to taste, or change it randomly from time to time to give your composition a more "organic" feel. Quantize allows you to playback a Style but only have hits that fall on a particular beat division playback. Using this function you can take a busy Style and simplify it by selecting a Quanitze value of 1/8. The settings are: Off, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4. The Swing slider pushes the timing of all tracks within a Style to a triplet feel, it's a variable control that has a value of 50% at Straight and 66.7% at at it's maximum.

One of Darbuka's strong suits is the amount of flexibility you have to vary the playback of a given Style. The Instruments control is unique and another example of Darbuka separating itself from being just another collection of exotic loops. The Instruments control has three radio buttons labeled High, Mid, and Bass. By turning them on or off you can control which types of tracks play back in a Style. The Complexity control is a variable slider with markings for Max, Mid and Low. Set at the Max position, the Style plays back as normal, as the slider is moved towards Low, hits are removed from the Style, leaving you with a simpler, more gentler groove.

The next set of controls on the Darbuka Play tab can be thought of as Darbuka's Effects section. They are: Ambience, Equalizer, and Dynamics. These also apply to the Style as a global effect. Ambience (reverb) has controls for Mix and Time. There's also a drop-down menu that brings up presets with varieties of Hall, Chamber, Room, Ambience, and Stage. These are designed to give you a general character of sound with which you can control the Mix and parameter to suit your needs. It's worth pointing out that Ambience can function in Surround Mode as well as Stereo Mode.

The Equalizer allows you to tailor the sound to your needs, it features a Low and High control, of the shelving type. I was unable to figure out where the shelving frequency points were. Both bands of EQ offer +/- 12 dB of gain/reduction. The Dynamics effect offers you a 'Density' (compression ratio) control, along with a drop-down menu with settings of Fast, Tight, and Slow. These settings translate to presets for attack and release combinations. That wraps up the controls on the Play tab, We'll take a brief look at the Mix tab next.

Whereas the Play tab is generally geared towards making global edits to all the tracks in the currently loaded Style, the Mix tab is more focused towards affecting the individual Tracks within the Style. The upper portion of the Mix page is dedicated to the Stage, a large area with a graphic of the instruments in the currently loaded Style. The Stage makes it easy to grab an instrument and move it horizontally to control Panning, or vertically to control your choice of Level, Ambience, or Front/Rear balance. Room Mode, another option, allows you to place yourself center stage, with the instruments surrounding you. As you move them along the X/Y axis their sound changes accordingly in the surround field.

Below the stage area is where the Track Mixer is located. A nifty 3-band EQ, in which you have control over the frequency and amplitude for each of the 3 points (holding down Alt while moving a point horizontally changes Q—nice). Next to this there is a Punch control knob with a drop-down menu for you to select the following: Power, Snap, Hard, Soft. It looks like this is another form of the Dynamics control, only it applies to individual instrument tracks. The remainder of the Track Mixer has controls for: Level, Pan, Rear Balance, Ambience, and a selector for Individual Output capability.

The last tab on the right side of Darbuka's screen is the Edit tab. This tab allows you to create and edit arrangements of Parts (the individual instrument performances) and assign that arrangement to a MIDI key for triggering. When the Edit tab is selected, the Pattern tab on the left side comes to the front also as these two tabs work together.

The upper portion of the Edit tab is devoted to a grid, the rows in the grid are all the different patterns that have been setup. Looking at a column gives you a quick idea of the patterns a particular instrument track is assigned to play with.

Right clicking on a cell gives you a drop down menu from which you can choose to have that cell do a number of things. Play nothing (None), a performance of that instrument (there are typically a few loops to choose from), have the cell continue to play the loop from the previously chosen Pattern (No Change), or assign the cell to a Mute group (Mute), which you can control on the fly from your MIDI controller. Two other selections in this same menu only apply to Fill Patterns. Simplify thins out a Part and Quantize, which removes all percussion hits busier than an 1/8th note timing.

Below the Part arranger grid are the Part Parameters. These controls are similar to the ones found on the Play page with the exception that these can be applied to individual Parts, Patterns, or Tracks. The additional controls that are found in the Part Parameters are: Tuning (adjusts the pitch of the selected Part), Bend Range (responds to your pitch wheel movements) , Decay (reduces the time each hit takes to fade out), and Offset (offsets playback of the track in milliseconds).

As you may have gathered by now, Wizoo have made Darbuka to be very flexible in a recording environment. With the addition of assignable controls, Darbuka can lend itself well to live performance too. Darbuka uses MIDI CC messages for external control. Since most of the controls have a Learn function, you can set your external MIDI controller up quite quickly. The assignments are saved within the host application's file—nice!

Conclusion

Darbuka took me by surprise. What I originally perceived to be a loop library of a bunch of Middle Eastern percussion turned out to be far more. In addition, the overall sonic quality of the content is excellent in my opinion. This software would serve equally well in a World Music Producer's library as well as for Film/TV work. The sounds are very useable, sound authentic, and give the user some quite powerful capabilities. I guess that's why they call it a Virtual Percussionist—good job Wizoo!

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