Dear customer, thank you for buying our instrument.

This manual will explain how to use our legato

engine. Since many different instruments share the

FluffyAudio same script, here you have a complete overview about

how to use and control our instruments.

Not all the features will be available in all the libraries,

depending by the available articulations in the

Legato Engine Manual instrument, but overall the manual explains all
the features and functions included in your instrument.

We will use Stefania Maratti - Solo Flute interface for

screenshot purposes.

manual revision 1.1

INSTALLATION
Extract the files Instrument_Samples.part01.rar and Instrument_Patch.rar
in a new folder.
If you don’t know how to open .rar files, we suggest you todownload 7zip from www.7-zip.org (windows us-
ers) or www.unrarx.com (mac users).

Then you can load the main relative .nki patch. by importing the patch into Kontakt.

Getting Started
Welcome! In the next few pages we’ll have a detailed look at all the features of the library.
This library has been designed to be very simple to play. It’s all contained in a single .nki patch, and most of
the features are ready to play.
The pitch wheel control is one of the special features of this library. Increase it to produce a strong attack at
the beginning of a phrase, or lower it to produce a smooth crescendo. Similarly, at the end of a phrase you
can lower it to create a natural decrescendo. All these behaviors are completely customizable in the articula-
tion editor.
When playing legato the Pitch wheel allows you to produce different types of legato. Paired with the
control offered by the mod wheel, you have the tools to create beautiful and realistic legato lines.
Refer to the following pages to see how to control it all!

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THE INTERFACE
There are 6 pages for customizing the instrument.
Let’s look at them one by one.

The Overview page presents the basic controls. You

can also check what the instrument
is doing by looking at the VU meters on the OTHER CONTROLS
right side. If something sounds strange, just check On the right there are buttons to switch on/off
the VU meters. Usually you will be able to fix every the mics, as well as the reverb amount slider. They
issue immediately, using the meters to find out what’s are explained in more detail below.
happening.

PRESETS
On the left side there is the preset system. To load a
preset, just click in the box and select one from the
menu. If you want to save your own preset, select
“Save to:”, then select the preset in which you want
to save your settings. The presets will be stored when
you next save the patch.
Presets save all the settings of the instrument, except
the ones in the preferences panel and the current
keyswitch.
Presets are handy if you wish to save your
favourite starting points for the instrument.

ARTICULATIONS
The lower panel on the left shows the articulations
and their relative keyswitches. These are completely
configurable in the Behavior page. You can also set
your own keyswitches by clicking on the small key
name. You can switch articulations by clicking on the
labels or by using your own keyswitches.

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MICROPHONES Saturation is the opposite of the Silkener and it
On the left there are three available mic positions: gives more character to the sound.
Close, Mid and Far.
When a mic position is active, the relative slider for LIMITER
its volume is displayed below. You also have the abil-
ity to independently filter each position with High The Limiter compresses the sound. It can be very
and Low Pass filters. effective if it is modulated by the Modwheel. In this
On the right side of the page there are four important way you have great control over dynamics by reduc-
tools to sculpt the sound of the instrument. By ad- ing the dynamic variations inside the samples.
justing the amount below the control (the little knob (More about the dynamics later)
labeled “mw”) you can easily automate the Silkener,
Saturation and Limiter tools. REVERB
Let’s look at these effects in detail. Here you can adjust the amount of reverb, and select
one of the impulses from the drop-down menu.
SILKENER There are 17 convolution IRs included.
The Silkener is basically an EQ which mimics the
harmonic spectrum of the flute when playing at low
dynamics.
It can be used to sweeten the sound of the instru-
ment, to emulate soft dynamics and to increase the
dynamic range. It’s very effective when the mod
wheel curve is inverted, so that when playing in
lower dynamics it makes the sound more silky and
smooth.
SATURATION

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The behavior page allows you to create and customize max duration controls the duration of the single layer
any articulation. legato passage. You can choose between two basic
options: a long duration time, which only has one
In the top bar you can set the names for all the ar- dynamic layer, but no phasing artifacts, or a short
ticulations in the instrument, as well as their key- duration time (with the back to sustain group set)
switches and the kind of articulation. which gives you full control over the dynamics, but
some phasing artifacts may occur.
There are currently three kinds of articulations: Le-
gato, Short and Instant. BACK to SUSTAIN time
From the Articulations Menu you can choose which This is the crossfade time the Sustain will take to
articulation you want to customize, add a new articu- come back after the legato duration time. A longer
lation or delete the current one. time helps to achieve a smoother transition.
All the unused groups in the instrument will be auto-
matically purged. SECOND PAGE
There’s a second page for the legato articulations.
Legato articulations In this page you can set conditions like “if velocity
Legato articulations consist of a sustained note, a is higher than 64 sustain, use accented”. These condi-
legato transition which fades back into the sustain tions override the settings of the currently selected
after a while, and a short release sample. articulations. You can set conditions based on veloc-
All the groups involved can be changed. You can ity, playing speed and Mod wheel settings.
disable the Back to Sustain behavior (and just use the
legato transition) by setting its group to none. You These settings will override any pitch wheel triggered
can also remove or customize the release samples. articulations. The second of two statements will
This page allows you to control the timing of the override the first one.
transitions between the different phases. Here you also see also the optional controls for Syn-
thesized Vibrato, which works better with non-vibra-
The first value, max time, controls the responsiveness to groups. In the preferences panel, you can set your
of the instrument when playing legato. Lower values own midi CCs for controlling the rate and the
are more responsive, at the cost of lower quality amount of synthesized vibrato.
transition sounds. Higher values can create a consist-
ent delay, but they are more realistic. You can modify
thecrossfade curve by dragging it.

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Short articulations group for all the four RR states. On the right you can
The short articulations can be customized as well, assign control of dynamics to velocity (the default
by selecting up to 4 variations per round robin setting) or to the mod wheel.
(round robin is the alternation between different “Stop DCE Analysis after ...”, prevents the short ar-
samples, to reduce the “machine gun” effect.) ticulation from being affected by the DCE engine.
This allows the short note sample to decay
If you don’t want to use RRs you can select the same correctly.

Instant Articulations
These articulations can’t be played normally.
Instead, they fade in over the currently played
note. When you release the keyswitch or play another
note, the momentary articulation will fade out as
well. These are great to perform trills or to
morph a sound into a flutter tonguing articulation.
You can select the group from the available ones
and set the crossfade time and curve as well.
On this page we explain the core aspects of Usually the middle position results in the best of
the DCE engine. DCE stands for Dynamic Control both worlds.
Engine. By using an external tool, we’ve extracted the
volume information for each sample in the instru- Use also CC11 for volume allows lets you set an ad-
ment. This allows us to create volume adjustments ditional volume control, which can be also remapped
to ensure that the dynamics and the transitions flow as desired in the preferences page.
seamlessly into one another.
--------
The Dynamics page features a large slider labelled
NATURAL/AUTO-GAIN. On the right, the numbers between the dynamic lay-
ers indicate the crossover point at which the sustain
NATURAL mode leaves the samples as is, and the dynamic layer changes. When the modwheel is in
DCE simply tweaks the limit volume for the transi- that range the instrument will switch to its own dy-
tions, while the mod wheel reduces the volume namic layer.
by the amount specified in the mod wheel
dynamic range box. The duration of the crossfade between dynamic
layers in sustain mode is defined with the smooth
AUTO-GAIN mode forces all samples to a specific dB time indicator. Here you can also edit the crossfading
setting, specified by the mod wheel dynamic range curve.
box.
The two modes are quite different, and you will By decoupling the layers’ crossfade and the relative
hear a significant change in the dynamic range and in volume control of the layers, we’ve been able to create
the control of the instrument. seamless changes between the different dynamic
The first mode is not as easily playable, but it has a layers.
great breathing sound, especially during crescendo/
decrescendo and on short notes.
The second mode is much more playable, but it has
a compressed sound, which forces the user to move
the mod wheel further. However, shorter notes and
crescendo/decrescendo will sound a little less realistic.
Obviously, a compromise between the two systems is
the best solution, and that’s the point of the slider!

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The compensator controls and matches the user to add a mild accent to the notes when playing
samples’ volumes. If you look on the first page, you’ll legato passages. Sometimes it can also be useful
see that when playing legato a little meter appears to manually tweak the volumes of the legato
under each layer. This is the compensator adjust- transitions.
ment, that changes the volume of the new notes to
match the volume of the previous ones.

In this panel you can configure the main settings for

the compensator.

DCE RANGE sets the total dynamic action of the

DCE. In the image above, for example, the DCE can’t
increase the samples to more than +6db and can’t
lower their volume to less than -18 db. Setting the
range is important: it limits the action of the compen-
sator, preventing the samples from playing at un-
natural volume levels.

Compensator amount controls the total amount of the

compensator’s action.

Inherits from previous aallows you to conserve some

of the residual compensator from the previous
samples. Lower values create less consistency when
playing fast. In contrast, higher values can cause a
decaying sound, due to excessive amounts of inher-
ited compensation.

Compensator time controls how fast the compensator

takes to go to 0.

Velocity --> compensator allows you to control a bit of

the compensator’s action with velocity, allowing the

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REMAPPINGS a higher amount. It will save you some computer
Here you can remap the various controls of the in- resources, but the screen animations will be less fluid.
strument: the mod wheel, the pitch wheel, expression TUNING
(CC11) and the optional Synth Vibrato. You can choose between 440 and 442 tuning.

ENGINE ACCURACY HUMANIZE TUNING

Sets the resolution of the engine. Higher settings The humanizer allows you to create a more human
consume more CPU but give a better sound with feel by slightly detuning the instrument.
less lag. The humanizer tries to imitate a human style of
playing, though just intonation and by modulating
GUI REFRESH the tuning according to the currently played dynam-
If you want to save some CPU set this value to ic.

Thanks to Stefania, Francesco, John and

Michele for their beautiful skills and to
the wonderful team at Teatro delle Voci
in Treviso.

Thanks to Alan Belkin for manual revi-

sion.

produced by Paolo Ingraito and Olmo

Chittò.

Thanks to Gabriela for her patience :-)

Have fun,
FluffyAudio Team

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