 Having spent less than one hour with Lineage Percussion, I had come up with this. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. To add to an already impressive collection of percussion libraries, Project SAM have just released Lineage Percussion and you heard a small sample of it in that demo. I should also mention that I used another library of theirs for the horns and the strings. That was Symphobia 2. I'll put a link for that in the description down below. That's an awesome library. Now this new library comes in a couple of different flavours to suit different budgets. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but first of all let's dive in and find out how this really does sound great and they've thought of some things to make it easier for you to do common tasks. Lineage Percussion is a contact library and there's basically three different types of library you can load in. The first is individual instruments. Now as well as the individual instruments, there's some variations of some of them. So for example there's four different tom-tom instruments and you can also load them in as a set as well so that you can use all four at once and you get some nice variation like that. The second type of library you can load in is an actual kit. Now as its name suggests this has got a number of different instruments within it as a kit and there's a few different themes to get you started with there. So that's a really good way to get started with a project. And the other type of library that you can load in is the one that I use mostly in my demo called Builders. Now the first of these is just called the kit builder and it's for untuned percussion and in my little demo that was sounding like this. So builders are a great way to sort of build your own custom kits and there's another type of builder it's called the melodic builder and that is for tuned percussion and in my demo that was sounding like this. I've loaded up the timpani instrument here in Lineage Percussion because it contains most of the features that we find in other libraries but different instruments have different features obviously. So let's go through the main interface here quickly. On the left hand side we can see the different articulations for this instrument. Now I'm changing them with my mouse at the moment but you can change them with key switches and you can see those key switches highlighted in red and the keyboard at the bottom here. So that's a much quicker way of changing different articulations during a performance. Then in the middle section of this interface here we have first of all the performance section. This is a kind of a mixer for the various microphones available. We'll dive into that a lot deeper later and then we also have some mapping and some settings options there as well. And then on the right hand side this is where we mainly find our kind of envelope section but there's also some effects in there as well. So let's dive a little deeper into the articulations. So our first articulation of course is just the regular hit that we can see here and you'll notice with many of these instruments that there's a really good dynamic range with the hits. They go from pretty quiet hits to a really nice big loud one. So with this timpani for example you can do some pretty gentle stuff and build it up to some really loud stuff as well. Now experience users amongst you will know that sometimes creating things like rolls and even then editing and changing them for different parts of your piece can be quite tricky but they have this roll articulation here which makes things super super easy. Now with the basic setting or the initial setting here it's set to beats. You can see that at the bottom here and I can simply set the number of beats that I want my roll to last for. So it's set for two beats at the moment. I'll just hold down that G key and it lasted for two beats and you get a really nice realistic sounding roll. I can change this to one beat. It will sound like this. Yeah or I could go say to four beats like so. Yeah and four beats long so that makes it super easy to set you know how long your roll is going to be. But there's another setting which I really like and that is the downbeat setting. Now in order to sort of demonstrate this and see how it works let's just go over to my piano roll here and you can see this note here. It's signing halfway through a bar and then it's just sort of going across this bar line here the second bar and just sort of randomly finishing up here. Now this is set to downbeat at the moment. Let's have a listen and actually see what happens. So you can see the note started here but it ended on that first beat of the bar the downbeat. So even if I move this note back here somewhere it'll start here but it'll always end on that downbeat even if I extend the end of it like so and that's a really nice feature to have because we're often focused on where we want that roll to finish. So the roll feature is great and it's really useful with things like cymbals and sort of reverse cymbals and things like that as well it works very very well. Now the other way you can get a kind of a roll is with the tremolo articulation. If I switch to that now and I'll just hold down a key it sounds like this and this enables me to get really really sort of long rolls if you like. The nice thing about this is that you can use the modulation wheel on your keyboard to adjust the actual sort of loudness of that, the volume I guess or the velocity probably is a better thing to say and with that you can get some nice sort of swelling rolls like this. This will be a kind of a fiddly thing to program if you're trying to do that by hand so that's a nice feature there and finally on this instrument we've got an articulation chord effects and there's all kinds of weird and wonderful things here. I did use one of these in my demo at the beginning have a listen all kinds of fun things that they can really add some character to your piece I find. So with the performance section in the middle we start off in pre-mixed mode. This is a really nice starting point for most instruments and it combines all the various microphones used to record the library and we can pan our instrument using this little dot in the middle here by dragging it obviously from left to right but if we go off of that middle axis and drags a forward we automatically go into XY stage mode. So this is a 2D way of panning so we can pan left to right but also close and far away as well. Let's just have a listen to this timpani performance as I do that. It's a nice and close here and far away. So there's a really nice way to set individual instruments in a 2D space. We can also mix those microphones so if I go to the custom mix I think this is really great fun actually. For example let's just turn everything down and we'll start off with the close mic here. We'll turn that up have a listen but let's pan it all the way over to the left and then let's take that far mic pan it to the right and turn that up and have a listen to this. So I love doing this because you get this nice sort of present instrument here on one side with its kind of reverb on the opposite side if you like. So it's just one of the things that you could do there with that custom mix. So even when we're in performance mode we can still easily remap our main performance keys just by grabbing them and dragging them around on the keyboard at the bottom here and this moves them an octave at a time. This is really useful especially later on when we look at kits or builders to make sure that instruments don't collide with each other if you don't want them to. But there's also some more intricate mapping features and we get to those by clicking on the mapping tab up here. Here we can do things once we're in this mode we can do things like map our different articulations we can see that here. We can also extend the range of the notes that can be played with our instrument or decrease them if we like or restrict them. There's also a feature called note stacker here which enables us to play several notes at once okay so you can get different tones all at the same time. Like I have there and a few other features including some round robin features here so you can switch off some of the random notes that may be played with round robin here so switch them back on again. Lots of features there as you can see for mapping and there's also a settings tab which I'll just briefly show you here. I'm not going to go through this but it just demonstrates to you that there's a lot you can do with these instruments to sort of tailor them to your own needs. So over on the right hand side we've got some envelope and effects controls here and right away I just want to draw your attention to two buttons at the bottom here. The first one is called let ring and that lets it ring. In other words we get a lot of decay to our sound and then we have the dampen mode here so it's a dampened sound and the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that those two buttons actually are sort of presets for our envelope setting at the top here okay so if for example we are on the dampen mode here and we have a listen you can hear it's a pretty short sounding timpani but we can make it even shorter. Now it retains its setting so even if I go away to the ring mode maybe I set that really long. The dampen mode if I switch to that has the same setting that I set for earlier. So it's a really nice way for you to tailor the envelope of your instrument and of course we can also change the attack here. I'll do it here to this 808 milliseconds you get that kind of a fade-in effect there probably not super useful in a lot of times but you know you may want it from time to time. We also have a volume control for our individual instrument here that becomes much more relevant when we're using our builders later on because we can sort of mix the different instruments that we've got in our builder. A filter control, a reverb and a limiter as well. So as I mentioned earlier you get a number of kits depending on the version that you buy. I've got the basic orchestral kit loaded up here let's just have a quick listen to a few of the instruments here and you can see the instruments at the top here you can select them individually so I can select say the snare drum here and I can make changes to that instrument as you saw earlier with the individual instruments including you know moving them around with the performance controls as well but they do come with a kind of a preset setup if you like for the performance controls. So for example I'll bring in hits and rolls you can see it's got a very distinct set up there on the performance tab let's have a listen it's just really great a powerful sounding roll there isn't it and we've also got some true strike kits from the true strike heritage of Project Sam so this one for example is called lots of drums and there is indeed lots of drums in there and also some pitch percussion as well so here's another true strike kit called magic spell sounds like this some great sounds in there to inspire you. So for my demo at the beginning I really enjoyed using the builder to create my own kits you start off with a kind of a blank canvas as you can see here and if you go to the plus button up here you can see there's various different categories of percussion you can see on the right hand side and on the left hand side you can see the individual instruments so I'll go to symbols here and then I can actually audition any of these instruments by clicking on the little speaker icon so let's have a listen to a suspended symbol okay that sounds absolutely fine if I want to add it to my kit I just click on it and you can see that it appears here and it's been mapped to the keyboard here and it's set up as in the performance area right in the middle there this is important to pay attention to as we add another instrument so I'll go to the plus button at the top here and this time I'll go to snare drums I'll audition this second snare drum here sounds great and I'll click on that to add it to my kit and take a look at what happens when I do this so first of all in the performance area we can see that it's separated our two instruments the symbol and the snare there and also it's mapped them to different areas of the keyboard you can see the snare in orange here is mapped further to the right so we've got them separated on the keyboard and we can play them individually as you can see so that really helps to get us going very very quickly I'll add another instrument in here let's just randomly go for say toms I'll do some rotor toms I'll audition these ones sounds great and I'll add those in and you can see again in the performance area it separated the three instruments and it's also sort of map them to different areas of the keyboard and you can continue you can continue adding instruments in that way and it'll do a lot of stuff automatically for you so that you don't have to mess around too much with mapping you can still go ahead if you like and customize it you can still move these instruments from within the performance area if you wish and you can also go into the mapping you select individual instruments at the top here so I'll select snare here for example go to mapping and I can change the mapping for that particular instrument even when you're not in the mapping mode if you're in the performance mode just as we did earlier you can select an instrument I'll go for the symbols here and then I'll just drag them to a different area of the keyboard so I can customize everything if I want but it's also really quick and easy to set up during the creation process now I've been using the pro version of this library during this video which has the full complement of instruments and features but they also do a core version which is to suit people who have a smaller budget but it's still a very very impressive library follow the link in the description down below to find out the prices in your currency and also please leave a comment down below to let me know what your first impressions are of this library are you going to be buying it let me know I'd love to hear from you thank you so much for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video