SPITFIRE AUDIO SP SPITFIRE PERCUSSION USER MANUAL CONGRATULATIONS Thank you for purchasing Spitfire Percussion, a comprehensive orchestral percussion library featuring the renowned Joby Burgess in Lyndhurst Hall at Air Studios. Alongside a huge array of large and small percussion, timpani, bass drums and cymbals lie a set of mallet instruments described by Sound On Sound magazine as “to die for”.. Quick Specs Table Of Contents CONGRATULATIONS 2 • 43109 samples WELCOME 2 • 55.8 GB Uncompressed .WAV DOWNLOADING & INSTALLING 3 • 28.9 GB Disk space required REGISTERING WITH KONTAKT PLAYER 4 • 57.8 GB Disk space required during install FOLDER STRUCTURE 5 • Free Kontakt Player Included THE ‘KICKSTART’ INTERFACE 6 • New intuitive GUI with inline help OPTIONS 10 • Essential microphones (CTA) APPENDIX A - RECOMMENDED TECH SPECS 12 • Detailed sampling: APPENDIX B - KONTAKT vs KONTAKT PLAYER 12 - Multiple Instruments APPENDIX C1 - PRESET/ARTICULATION LIST 13 - Multiple Variation APPENDIX D - MIC & MIX ACRONYMS 14 - Multiple dynamics APPENDIX E - FAQS & TROUBLESHOOTING 15 - Multiple round robins - Release Triggers WELCOME Spitfire spent weeks at Air Studios recording a comprehensive gives you very usable instruments right out of the box, without orchestral percussion library with the renowned Joby Burgess you needing a degree in percussion to be able to assemble a (ensemblebash, Peter Gabriel, many major Film & TV scores) - a beautiful and detailed performance. You can concentrate on the collection full of life and character. This percussion library is the music rather than on the technology. ideal bedrock of your orchestral template. FEATURES The collection was recorded ‘in situ’ in Lyndhurst Hall, giving a degree of spatial richness that is extremely difficult to replicate As one of Spitfire’s earliest releases, the library is now at v5.1 - artificially. The mic positions give you control over the amount with Spitfire’s new KickStart percussion engine, springing easily of ambience in the sound, and the recording chain is strictly A out of the box, but also featuring great depth of customisation class - vintage valve and ribbon mics through Neve Montserrat for use with all kinds of controllers. preamps, through the world’s largest Neve 88R desk to metic- ulously maintained 2” tape, and finally converted via Prism AD. The library features up to 8 ‘round robins’ and up to 8 dynamic layers, as ever these are curated carefully so that for example BACKGROUND the loudest ffff layer of the Timpani is played with a wooden mallet to give that extra welly, while the ppp layer is a geni- Joby Burgess is an exceptionally talented percussionist, and has une super-quiet performance rather than a mid volume hit just worked hard to give Spitfire Percussion a hugely flexible and scaled down like in so many libraries. Conversely, the Ship’s Bell intuitive workflow. Playing in the beautiful Hall at Air Lyndhurst doesn’t have quite so many dynamic layers! These choices made is an inspiring experience and this passion can be heard in the during production result in the best balance of performance and end result of the recordings. features, meaning that you get huge detail while the library is still usable in practice and doesn’t gobble up system resources. Spitfire founders Paul and Christian worked with Joby to curate the most essential articulations and playing styles. An example of this, the Marimba in which Joby chooses the most appropriate beater for each range and dynamic, was described by Sound On Sound magazine as “to die for” - this careful process of vetting PAGE 2 SP - USER MANUAL DOWNLOADING & INSTALLING Thank you for buying this Spitfire product. If you are a total newbie to this kind of thing you can get up to speed here: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/info/basics/ First though, grab our ‘Library Manager’ app from this link: http://www.spitfireaudio.com/info/library-manager/ This app will enable you to download the library Once you’ve selected the location you can proceed with the download. NOTE THAT THE DOWNLOADER WILL CREATE A SUB-FOLDER FOR YOUR LIBRARY IN THE LOCATION SE- LECTED. This is important: if you have a multi part library, or an update, it means that the Library Manager app will look INSIDE the selected location for your library folder. If its not there, it will create a new library folder. So, if you mistakenly select the actual ‘SSB library’ folder itself, when adding content or doing an When you launch the app you will be prompted to login using update, instead of the location (one folder level up) that CON- the same details you use at our site. Then you’ll see your avail- TAINS this library folder, you’ll end up with a nested mess!! able downloads: TOP TIP: You will need approx TWICE the amount of hard drive space as the library uses (see the product page on our site for this info) to download: this is because the zip files are all downloaded, and then unzipped. This process takes a while so don’t panic if it looks like its frozen! TOP TIP 2: If you get in a total mess you can reset the download of either the whole library or just the latest update from the ‘Library’ menu of the app. This is limited to a couple of downloads as band- width is expensive! Please only do this if you actually need to. You’ll also see an option to Change Install Location, if you se- lected the wrong one, at any time you can hit the PAUSE button to pause the download, then select CHANGE INSTALL LOCA- Once you have selected what you wish to download on the left TION and the app will move all the downloaded files to the new pane and clicked the ‘download’ button you will have the option location. Once it has finished you’ll be prompted if you want to to select a location. proceed, THEN you can hit the RESUME button to continue the download in the new location. A default location will be generated but you’ll most likely want to change this. Here’s how! Click on the two little vertical arrow- heads to the right of the default location. You will be presented with the following options, and you’ll want to click ‘CHOOSE’. SP - USER MANUAL PAGE 3 REGISTERING WITH KONTAKT PLAYER If you’ve never used one of our libraries before and you don’t own a copy of Native Instruments Kontakt, you’ll need to down- load the free “Kontakt Player” here: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/samplers/kontakt-5/downloads/ If you’d like to find out more about the differences between absolutely have the latest version of it downloaded via NATIVE Kontakt and Kontakt Player (we know, very confusing!) go to ACCESS. Our libraries are frequently updated and often simply Appendix B. won’t work on any previous versions. We cannot describe the multitude of painful symptoms you will experience if you don’t If you’d also like to know what we recommend as an optimal set do this! up please go to Appendix A. 1. Install Kontakt Player and Native Access (skip this step if you already have these installed) 2. Open the player (or Kontakt 5 full version if you have that) and click ‘add library’ in the library browser window: 3. You will be promted to enter the serial number in this format: xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx ...This can be found in your ‘ready to download’ email. 4. Now you have added the library to Native Access and you will be prompted to browse to the library folder. 5. Navigate to and select the library folder, in this case the ‘Spit- fire Percussion library’ folder that contains your library’s instru- ments and samples folders, and also contains the ‘nkr’ and ‘nkc’ files. 6. Your library is authorised. If the library does not add to the libraries pane or disappears when you re-open Kontakt, see Ap- pendix E - Troubleshooting and common problems If you have never used Kontakt before we wholeheartedly rec- ommend that you familiarise yourself with the basics of patch (or instrument) loading, multi management, outputting and midi routing detailed in the Kontakt user manual and native instru- ments website: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/sam- plers/kontakt-5/downloads/ If you are an established Kontakt user please make sure you PAGE 4 SP - USER MANUAL FOLDER STRUCTURE Looking in the main folder (right) for Spitfire Percussion you will see the instruments and basic drum groups listed as well as three folders containing the following: Individual instruments - each separate instrument from the Drums - High, Drums - Low, Toys, Unpitched - metal and Un- pitched - wood in their own individual patches. Double clicking on any folder will reveal its content and double clicking again will navigate up a level. Premade ensembles - these are premade groupings of instru- ments arranged in logical or commonly used. These include: Contemporary, Hands and hits, Low Ensemble, Metal Clangs, Snare ensemble and Traditional Orchestra. Unmapped ensembles - These are the same groupings of in- struments as above but the note ranges for each instrument have not been mapped, allowing you to map them to taste from scratch. OPENING YOUR FIRST INSTRUMENT. Simply double click an ‘nki’ file (this is Native Instruments’ file extension for a Kontakt instrument) to load, or indeed drag the instrument (it’ll have the little keyboard icon and the suffix .nki) from the left pane into the right pane. If you can’t hear anything double check first that the midi channel you are transmitting on with your keyboard is the same as the one in the Kontakt Instrument! SP - USER MANUAL PAGE 5 THE ‘KICKSTART’ INTERFACE 1.