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The Interface

The main UI for Sultan Drums consists of a virtual keyboard at the top with 10 assignable sets of percussion loops. The individual instruments are pictured below that with their controls for pan, tune and volume.

Each set of loops (WAHDE, CIFTETELLI etc) can be assigned it’s own octave of the keyboard. To do this first click an octave of the keyboard at the top of the interface…

…then click a set of loops on the scroll below to assign from the 10 available…

To reassign simply click a different set. To deactivate the loop / octave click again the set that is assigned. To demonstrate; in the example above you would click CIFTETELLI which would deactivate the selection completely.

The 4 instruments which are available for playback in the activated loop are pictured with their control sliders and dials (only ARAP loops have 5 instruments):

Each instrument can be retuned or panned individually using the TUNE and PAN dials. The VOL slider will adjust the volume of the instrument.

An instrument can be muted by clicking it’s graphic. Alternatively keyswitches C1 – G1 can mute / unmute instruments.

NB:
The active mapped style is underlined in YELLOW in the GUI keyboard mapper:

Keyswitches

Sultan Drums provides several colored key switches for easy recognition and control:

BLUE and GREEN keys trigger the sample loops. BLUE keys depict the playable range for the current set of loops and GREEN keys display the entire playable keyboard range of loops.

The 5 lower keyswitches indicate if an instrument is muted or not and can be pressed to mute / unmute individual instruments. Keys C-G correspond to instruments 1-5. RED indicates the instrument will play and YELLOW will mute. These keyswitches are velocity sensitive, press them softly to mute and hard to unmute an instrument. The mutes are saved with the pattern, so for instance you can set the pattern on the first note of a playing range to have only Bass Darbuka, and then the pattern on the second one to have more instruments active, when you return to the first note it will have remembered it only has Bass Darbuka etc. Do note that any changes made to the mutes will only be effected on the next trigger of a pattern, so the mutes are not immediate, rather you set up the instrumentation for the next played pattern with them.

End Hits

Sultan Drums has an option to end a loop with a single percussion hit sample when the key is lifted. These samples vary on the performance that is playing. The hits will always play in time and are quantized to 16th notes. Use the END HIT button to turn this function on / off.

Intelligent Time Machine (ITM)

All the loops within Sultan Drums will sync within Kontakt to your host DAW tempo, however fast or slow.

The ITM function syncs loops to half-time or double-time when extreme tempo values are used. It is turned ON by default but you may prefer to have this function turned OFF so that the samples do not suddenly switch to half/double-time when manipulating large tempo changes.

Jump in Phrase

You can ‘jump’ between loops on-the-fly without restarting each phrase by using the JUMP PHRASE button. Click the button ON to activate this. Most loops within Sultan Drums are 8 bars long. So for example: Trigger cue A which will start at bar 1. Release cue A after 2 bars and trigger cue B and you will hear that sample playback begins not at bar 1, but instead at bar 3, continuing the natural flow of the loop.

FX samples

Thanks to the generosity of our performers we came away with more percussion samples than we needed. Instead of deleting these samples we have included them as bonus content. These samples consist of a variety of instrumentation and are useful for special effects and augmenting your percussion sections.

A compressed file named FX.rar of 120 exclusive samples can be found in the directory:
Sultan Drums / Documentation /

Instruments Patch – Main Interface

In addition to the hundreds of authentic loop recordings available within the main instrument, Sultan Drums is supplied with a secondary .nki instrument allowing you to play multi-sampled single hits.

The instrument features identical volume, tuning, pan, EQ and IR options as the main Sultan Drums instrument and they are accessed in the same way.

5 instrument slots are available to load a combination of 10 possible instruments. Click within a slot to choose it. Then click a percussion instrument graphic to assign that to the slot.

Keyboard layout

The 5 instrument slots are grouped across the keyboard in octaves as shown below. Each octave contains the same samples mapped twice to trigger keys, firstly beginning at C and secondly beginning at F#. The trigger key arrangement is repeated for each instrument on different octaves. This enables fast playing with two fingers on different notes. BLUE keys are trigger keys and RED keys indicate the currently selected instrument.

Turker Colak

We like to give praise to this incredible Musician who made Sultan Drums A dream come true.

For more insight on Turker please check:

https://twitter.com/#!/turkercolak
http://www.turkercolak.com.tr

…and a very special thanks to Ceyda Pirali