Dear customer, welcome to the Trio Broz: Solo Strings

series.

Played by sensible and talented musicians in an

outstanding recording hall, Trio Broz: Solo Strings
is a unique set of sample libraries that we are glad to
present to you.

manual revision 1.0

INSTALLATION
Extract the files Violin/Cello/Viola_Samples.part01.rar and Violin/Cello/Viola_Patch.rar
in a new folder.
If you don’t know how to open .rar files, we suggest that you download 7zip from www.7-zip.org (windows
users) or www.unrarx.com (mac users).

Then you can load the main Trio Broz: Solo Violin/Cello/Viola.nki patch.

Getting Started
Welcome! In the next few pages we’ll have a detailed look through all the features of the library.

This library has been designed to be super simple to play. It’s all contained in a single .nki patch and most of
the features are ready to be played.

The Pitchwheel control is one of the special features of this library. Increase it to produce a strong attack at
the beginning of a phrase and lower it to produce a smooth crescendo. Similarly at the end of a phrase you
can lower it to create a natural decrescendo.

When playing legato the Pitchwheel allows you to produce a slurred legato. Paired with the amount of control
offered by the Modwheel you’ll have lots of tools to create beautiful and realistic legato lines.

Refert to the following pages to see how to master the instrument!

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THE INTERFACE
There are 6 pages for customizing the instrument as you prefer.
Let’s see them one by one.
The Overview page presents a basic display of the
whole instrument. You can also check what the in-
strument is doing by looking at the VU meters on the
right side. If something sounds strange, just look at
the VU meters. Commonly you’ll be able to fix every
issue in an instant and the meters help to find what’s
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:” and then select the preset in which you
want to save your settings. The presets will be stored
when you save the patch again.
Presets save all the settings of the instrument, except
the ones in the preferences panel and the current
keyswitch.
Presets are quite handy if you wish to find your
favourite starting point for working with the instru-
ment.
ARTICULATIONS
The lower panel on the left shows the articulations
and their relative keyswitches.
You can switch articulation by clicking on the label
or by using keyswitches.
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TUNING
The humanizer allows you to create a more human
feel by slightly detuning the sound of the instrument.
The humanizer tries to imitate the human style of
playing with just intonation and then quickly retun-
ing the note to the tempered system.
LEGATO XFADE TIME
This is just a meter that shows how much the legato is
stretched according to the speed of the performance.
The max time value for the legato is defined in the
Behavior page.
BOW SOUND
When playing fast, or according to velocity, a subtle
bow sound can be emitted when changing notes. This
helps to make the transitions snappier when playing
fast passages. The first slider controls the volume of
these bows, the second controls how much they are
affected by velocity or the speed of playing.
OTHER CONTROLS
On the right you have the buttons to switch on/off
the mics and the reverb amount slider. They are ex-
plained better below.
MICROPHONES
On the left there are the three available mic positions: SATURATION
Close, Mid and Far. Saturation has the opposite effect of the Silkener. It
can give more character to the sound.
When the mic position is on, the relative slider for
the volume is displayed below. Furthermore, you LIMITER
have the ability to independently filter each position
with High and Low Pass filters. The Limiter compresses the sound. It can be very
effective if it is modulated by the Modwheel. In this
On the right side of the page there are four main way you can obtain a great control over dynamics
soundsculpting tools of the instrument. By adjusting and contain the dynamic excursions inside the sam-
the amount below the control (the little knob labeled ples.
with the little “mw”) you can easily automate the Silk- (More about the dynamics at the relative page)
ener, Saturation and Limiter tools.
REVERB
Let’s see the 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 when playing at low dynamics. It
can be used to sweeten the sound of the instrument,
to emulate sordino or to increase the dynamic range.
It’s very effective when the modwheel modulator is
inverted, so when playing in lower dynamics it closes
the sound.

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When playing a note in legato mode the instrument
dynamically switches from multi-layered sustain
samples and legato transitions.
For the vibrato mode we have recorded full legato
transitions with a long note after the transition.
This helps to avoid the phasing artifacts that often
occour when going back to sustain mode after the
legato transition.
On this page you can tweak all the phases of this
behavior for vibrato and non-vibrato articulations.
time helps to achieve a smoother transition, but the
phasing issues may be more prevalent.
It should be noted that the long duration mode
contains the full performance of the musicians when
playing legato, so it’s naturally more expressive than
the sustain-legato-sustain solution.
For non-vibrato mode the sustain-legato-sustain is the
best way and the presets have been tweaked to get the
transition as smooth as possible when playing non-
vibrato.

The first value, max time, controls the responsiveness SYNTH VIBRATO
of the instrument when playing legato. Lower values in non-vibrato mode, you have the option to activate
are more responsive at the cost of a lower quality an artificial vibrato mode.
transition sound. Higher values can have a consist-
ent delay but are more realistic. You can change the
crossfade curve by dragging it.

max duration controls the duration of the single

layer legato passage. You can choose between two
basic possibilities:
• a long duration time which only has a layer of
dynamic, but no phasing artifacts
• a short duration time which you will have full You can control the amount of vibrato by assigning it
control over the dynamics but soe phasing arti- to a controller in the Preferences page
facts may occur

BACK to SUSTAIN time

This in the crossfade time the Sustain will take to
come back after the legato duration time. A longer
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On this page we finally explain the core aspects of
the engine. This instrument is powered by the DCE
engine. DCE stands for Dynamic Control Engine. By
using an external tool we’ve extracted the volume
information for each sample in the instrument. This
allows us to create volume adjustments to be sure
that the dynamics and the transitions flow seamlessly.
The Dynamics page features a large slider labelled
NATURAL/AUTO-GAIN.
NATURAL mode keeps the samples unaffected, the
DCE simply limits to tweak volume for the transi-
tions while the modwheel simply reduces the volume
according to the amount specified in the modwheel
dynamic range box.
AUTO-GAIN mode forces all samples at a certain dB
amount specified by the modwheel dynamic range
box.
The two modes are noticeably different and you can
hear a great change in the dynamic range and in the
control of the instrument.
The first mode is slightly less playable, but it has a
great breathing sound, especially on crescendo/decre-
scendo and on short notes.
The second mode is much more playable, but it has
a compressed sound which forces the user to move
the modwheel further. Note that shorter notes and
crescendo/decrescendo will sound a little less realistic.
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Obviously a compromise between the two systems
is the best solution, and that’s the point of the slider.
Usually, the mid position results in the best of the
two worlds.
Use also CC11 for volume allows to set an additional
volume control, which can be also remapped in the
preferences panel
Velocity--> Attack
allows to use the velocity to change the attacks at the
beginning of a phrase.
Velocity --> CC1 on short articulations
allows to use the Modwheel or the Velocity for the
short articulations.
On the right the numbers between the dynamic lay-
ers indicate the crossover point at which the sustain
dynamic layer will change. When the modwheel is in
that range the instrument will switch to its own layer.
The duration of the crossfade between the dynamic
layers in the sustain mode is defined in the smooth
time indicator. Here you can also edit the crossfading
curve.
By decoupling the layers’ crossfade and the relative
volume control of the layers, we’ve been able to create
a seamless change between the different dynamic
layers.
The compensator is what controls and matches the
samples’ volumes. If you look at the status bar, you’ll
see that when playing legato a little meter appear
under the main bar. This is the compensator adjust-
ment, that changes the volume of the new new notes
to match the volume of the previous ones.
ability to add a little of accent to the notes when play-
ing legato passages. Sometimes it could be also useful
as a trick to manually tweak the volumes of the legato
transitions.

In this panel we 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 +6dBs and can’t
lower their volume to less than -18 dB. Setting the
range is important: it limits the action of the com-
pensator, but prevents the samples from playing at
unnatural volume levels.

Compensator amount controls the total amount of the

compensator action.

Inherits from previous allows to conserve some of the

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

Compensator time controls how fast the compensator

will take to go back to 0 .

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

compensator with the velocity, giving the user the

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REMAPPINGS
Here you can remap the different controls of the in-
strument: the modwheel, the pitchwheel, the expres-
sion (CC11) and the optional Synth Vibrato.
ENGINE ACCURACY
Sets the resolution of the engine. Higher settings
consume more CPU but will give a better sound and
create less lag.
GUI REFRESH
If you want to save some CPU just put this value to
the higher amount. It will save you some resources,
but animations will be less fluid.
TUNING
You can choose between 440 and 442 tuning.
KEYSWITCH POSITION
Allows to redefine the default position for the key-
switches’ block. There are three possible positions
available.

Thanks to Barbara, Giada and Klaus

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

produced by Paolo Ingraito and Olmo

Chittò.

Thanks to Angela Shi for manual revi-

sion.

Thanks to Gabriela for her patience :-)

Have fun,
FluffyAudio Team

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