REFERENCE MANUAL SYMPHOBIA COLOURS: ANIMATOR PROJECTSAM cinematic sampling
REFERENCE MANUAL SYMPHOBIA COLOURS: ANIMATOR
INTRODUCTION 3 INSTALLATION 4 PLAYING THE LIBRARY 5 USING THE INTERFACE 7 CONTACT PROJECTSAM 11 CREDITS 12 2
INTRODUCTION Thank you for purchasing ANIMATOR! Laughing clarinets, jazzy staccatos, xylophone winks and trombone slides SYMPHOBIA COLOURS: ANIMATOR is a library dedicated to all things funny. Instantly playable, ANIMATOR will become your go-to source when scoring cartoons, animated features, light games or tongue-in-cheek live action. ANIMATOR pays homage to the masters of animation scoring Scott Bradley and Carl Stalling. Featuring an ensemble that consists of (bass) clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, violin, contrabass, piano, harp and percussion, the library focuses on short, snappy and playable articulations, phrases and special effects. These recordings are grouped by action, with names such as Wink Wink, Uh Oh and Laughter, enabling you to quickly find the sound you need. ANIMATOR focuses on ensemble recordings, with differently arranged instrument combinations spread over the keyboard. A selection of articulations is also available for individual instruments, such as a laughing glissando played by just clarinet or trombone. Furthermore, a selection of cartoon sounds from SYMPHOBIA 3: LUMINA is included. The ANIMATOR interface allows for real-time mixing of the 3 mic positions, independent pitch and speed controlling, tempo syncing and an on-the-fly octave shifting. All this makes ANIMATOR our most playable and dare we say it funniest library to date. 3
INSTALLATION 1. USE YOUR CHALLENGE CODE If you purchased ANIMATOR directly from ProjectSAM, you can skip to step 2. If you did not purchase ANIMATOR directly from ProjectSAM, use your challenge code at www.projectsam.com/my-account to unlock your download and retrieve the product serial number you need to activate the library. 2. DOWNLOAD If you haven t done so yet, download ANIMATOR using the ProjectSAM Downloader, available for Mac or Windows from www.projectsam.com/my-account. 3. INSTALL KONTAKT PLAYER If you are new to Kontakt, download Kontakt Player 5 from www.projectsam.com/my-account and install it. If you already have Kontakt 5.3 or Kontakt Player 5.3 installed, you can skip to step 4. 4. ADD LIBRARY TO KONTAKT Add ANIMATOR to Kontakt Player using the Add Library button in the Libraries panel. Kontakt will ask you to browse for the library s folder, which is named Symphobia Colours Animator Library. Browse to this folder, select it, and confirm. ANIMATOR will now be listed in the list of Kontakt-based libraries. 5. ACTIVATE Click the Activate button in Kontakt and activate ANIMATOR using your product serial number. This number can be found in your ProjectSAM account at www.projectsam.com/my-account or in your order confirmation or registration e-mail. 4
PLAYING THE LIBRARY In this manual, the term instrument is used in the technical sense, for describing a Kontakt instrument file, as opposed to a musical instrument in the traditional sense. This means that an instrument can be anything ranging from a solo performance to a fully orchestrated chord or effect. INSTRUMENT TYPES Before starting to use ANIMATOR, it is useful to understand the different types of instruments you will encounter: 1. Playable articulations: short and snappy sounds. These can either be solo notes or notes played by a part or the whole of the ensemble. 2. Chords and arpeggios: pre-recorded chords and arpeggios that can be triggered with single keys. 3. Runs: pre-recorded major, whole tone and chromatic upward and downward runs in various orchestrations. 4. Phrases. These are small musical gestures, often only one or two seconds long, recorded in various keys and arrangements. Phrases can have a more tonal or atonal nature. THE ENSEMBLE The following musical instruments are featured in ANIMATOR, either performing solo or as part of the recorded ensemble: Clarinet / Bass Clarinet Bassoon Bb Trumpet Tenor Trombone Violin Double Bass Grand Piano Concert Harp Various Percussion 5
GROUPED BY ACTION ANIMATOR s instruments are grouped by action, such as Wink Wink, Uh Oh and Laughter. This enables you to quickly browse the instrument list, find the sound you need and get right back to scoring. LOW VELOCITY ENSEMBLE Almost all ANIMATOR instruments have ensemble staccatos mapped to the lower velocity range. This greatly increases the flexibility and musicality of the instruments. It allows you to musically end a phrase or connect two effects with one or more on-the-fly staccato notes. SOUNDS FROM OTHER PROJECTSAM LIBRARES Some of the phrases and cartoon percussion in ANIMATOR have been taken from SYMPHOBIA 3: LUMINA. The snare drum hits are from TRUE STRIKE. 6
USING THE INTERFACE INFORMATION DISPLAY A lot of ANIMATOR instruments offer different types of sounds across the keyboard. For example: the lower regions of the keyboard may trigger double bass, while the higher regions may contain a wah trumpet. The information display will provide information about the region you are playing in. It will also tell you if any special options are available, such a alternate arrangement mapped to modulation wheel or velocity. Kontakt s on-screen keyboard shows you where each region starts and stop using alternating blue and yellow keys. To turn off the information display, click on it. This might become preferable when triggering large amounts of notes in different regions. 7
MICROPHONE SLIDERS The instruments in ANIMATOR are offered in three fully separate microphone channels named Direct, Ambient and Wide ( d, a and w ). Direct: a mix of spot mics, positioned close to the instruments. Ambient: stereo pair located just behind the conductor s spot. Wide: two microphones at the far left and right sides of the conductor s spot. The levels and balance of these individual mic channels can be adjusted using the three vertical sliders in the interface. Click the d, a or w fader labels to purge a mic channel. This means it is unloaded from memory, which can save a substantial amount of RAM. Click the fader label again to reload the mic channel. By default, all three mic channels are loaded. Please note that instruments that offer the large Speed control use significantly more RAM than instruments that don t. This is because real-time time stretching requires all samples to be fully loaded into RAM, as opposed to only a fragment of each sample as buffer. MICROPHONE CROSS-FADER The microphone cross-fader allows you to smoothly morph between Close and Stage preset mixes of the three individual mic channels. It allows you to quickly change the sound and ambience, without having to control the mic channel faders individually. To illustrate: in Close position, the Direct mic channel is fully open, Ambient is closed and Wide is slightly open. Half-way, all three mic channels are partly open. In Stage position, the Direct mic channel is closed, Ambient is fully open and Wide is significantly open. 8
TEMPO SYNC A selection of ANIMATOR instruments offer tempo syncing, which time-stretches the sounds to match your host s BPM tempo. ANIMATOR s tempo sync engine automatically determines how to interpret the host tempo. When using 130 BPM runs in a 80 BPM project it makes more sense to interpret the host tempo at double the speed, 160 BPM, so that the runs are only played back a tiny bit faster, than to slow them all the way down to 80 BPM. To overwrite automatic tempo interpretation, use the x1/2, x1 or x2 buttons. If you disable tempo syncing by clicking the tempo sync button, the manual speed control will appear. Note that you can still use the x1/2, x1 and x2 buttons in manual speed control mode. SPEED CONTROL The majority of ANIMATOR instruments have a speed control that allows you to time-stretch the instrument on-the-fly. Time-stretching increases or decreases the length of the samples without changing their pitch. By default, the modulation wheel has been mapped to the speed control for extra convenience. To reset the speed control to 100% (no time-stretching), click the control while holding down the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key. OCTAVE SHIFT The octave shift control allows you to quickly change the placing of the instrument on the keyboard by one or more octaves. For example, an instrument mapped between C2 and G5 by default can be nudged to the left by, say, one octave, placing it between C1 and G4. This gives you greater flexibility when combining multiple instruments, be it from ANIMATOR or other libraries. 9
ATTACK & RELEASE Use the attack and release controls to adjust an instrument s attack (fade in) and release (fade out) envelopes. This will not affect the length of an instrument s release trail sample. REVERB Use the reverb control to add additional convolution reverberation to the instrument. When the reverb control is turned all the way down, the effect is bypassed, saving CPU usage. Reverb is turned off by default for most instruments. VELOCITY Use this control to change the velocity response of the instrument. If you find it difficult to trigger the softer velocity layers in Animator, turn down the velocity control to better match the response of your MIDI controller. The velocity control has 5 settings. In its most right position it leaves the original velocity unchanged. PITCH Use the pitch control to alter the instrument s tuning. For instruments with tempo syncing or speed control, this is done without altering the length of the samples. For all other instruments, the length of the samples is altered along with their pitch. RESET To reset a control to its default value, click the control while holding down the Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) key. 10
CONTACT PROJECTSAM We re here to help! If you have a question about ANIMATOR, e-mail us directly at support@projectsam.com. Please make sure to mention your product serial number and provide sufficient information in case of a technical question. 11
CREDITS ProjectSAM development team Maarten Spruijt, Vincent Beijer, Marco Deegenaars, Joep Sporck, Stijn van Beek and Danny van Swieten Graphical design Dickie Chapin Manual design Martijn Lammerts ProjectSAM would like to thank: SteptimeWare (USA), Bestservice (Germany), Time+Space (UK), Crypton (Japan), Daniël Hamburger, Joris Holtackers, Dan Santucci, Native Instruments, Rolf van Kreeveld, Jules van Hessen and Isa McKechnie. 12
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